Project Bifrost
by Jerry Z.Z
Summary: As one of the best engineers of the most advanced private technology company, Hiccup Haddock receives a lot of respect from his colleagues. But no one knows that deep inside, this genius engineer has a broken heart and soul. When a group of mysterious customers visits his lab, everything starts changing. Hiccstrid Modern AU.
1. Chapter 1

**Hi, guys! Thanks for stopping by. This is my second fan fiction about How to Train Your Dragon. **

**This is a modern AU story. Hopefully you'll like it.**

**Reminder: _How_**_** To Train Your Dragon**_** movie franchise is owned by Dreamworks Animation and the book series is owned by Cressida Cowell**

* * *

Chapter 1:

"Hiccup! Fishlegs! For the fiftieth time, stop fooling around in the fucking lab! And what happened to this place? It looks more like a giant trash can than a laboratory!" A six feet five man with long beards dangling in front of his chest fought his way through piles of equipment, data sheets, computers, and machines while trying to not step on some sensitive, million dollars electronic devices. "How can you work in this mess?"

"Come on, Gobber, we are just having fun here," Still romping around with his co-worker, Hiccup Haddock, an engineer who was working for a private technology company called "Muspelheim", laughed at his superior, Main Engineer Gobber.

"What in the name of…Fishlegs! Put that sensor on the table right now! Mr. Timothy bought that for fifty thousand dollars! Fifty thousand! It's for god damned research purposes, not a knock-off grenade that you use to throw at someone!" Main Engineer Gobber the Belch dashed over to Fishlegs and seized the black and opaque sensor from Fishlegs right hand and rested it carefully in a box with foam to protect the contaminants from impact..

Hiccup and Fishlegs were both dressed in their white, water-and-slightly-fire proof lab coats. Holding a clipboard with some papers attached to it, he rolled the long sleeves of his lab coat up, exposing the scars and cuts on his arms from multiple accidents during field testing and constructing weird and whimsy machines. For an 18-year-old, Hiccup had an absolutely average body shape, five feet eight, skinny torso, not a lot of muscles and not a lot of fats, just like a boy that could be easily overlooked in a crowd. His forest green eyes were slightly covered behind his long, dark brown hair. Fishlegs was completely oversized, as large as three Hiccups. His lab coat was customized due to his unusual size.

"What's the big deal with that shit? Just ask Mr. Timothy and buy another one. This company is rich," Hiccup humorously and carelessly made a gesture of "counting money" and pointed at the sensor with the hand that held a clipboard with research data. "And I can see that your profanity problem hasn't been solved yet. I'm pretty sure that Mr. Timothy won't be happy about that."

"First of all, that sensor is a big shit. Mr. Timothy gave that to you because he trusts you. Second, this company is not fucking rich, or no longer fucking rich. Do you know how much money we need every month and how much money you guys wasted? You are the most talented engineer in this company, so please stop acting like a five-year-old," While Gobber questioned Hiccup, Fighlegs tried to move away silently and avoid getting himself questioned by Gobber. Everyone in the science and engineering department knew that being questioned by Gobber was better than being questioned by people holding guns.

"And where do you think you are going? You are not inculpable, Fishlegs," Gobber raised his tone. "Don't try to sneak your butt out and pretend that you didn't do shit."

Fishlegs froze. He put his hands into his pocket and looked around pretending that he was innocent.

After a long pause, Gobber signed, "I know that you two are intelligent and whatnot, and we can tolerate some of your minor 'fooling around', but if you get yourselves into some serious troubles, you are not the only two people who will get your ass kicked."

Muspelheim, a private company that dealt with every kind of technology, from electronic cloaking to create a spaceship that could land on the sun without getting itself evaporated. The Timothy family, one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in this world, which used to dominate the nasdaq, founded this company a couple of decades ago in order to create their personal laboratory that could surpass DARPA. Today, Muspelheim became one of the most advanced technology companies. With its 150 engineers from all around the globe, even DARPA wouldn't, and couldn't say that themselves were in the lead. The advancement of this company forced their engineers to use high-quality apparatuses, computers, equipment, and materials to serve their customers, otherwise, their fame that spent decades to build up would vanish instantly. The Timothy family, which spent billions and billions of dollars for Muspelheim, almost went bankrupt during some of the most severe time periods of this company.

Their clients, in order to receive one of the best technical supports and services in this world, must pay a crazy amount of money to Muspelheim. The expensiveness of dealing with high tech wasn't a joke. The average cost for a project would vary from around nine hundred thousand to two million. Some big projects, like when two years ago, a mysterious client paid eight million dollars for a genetic decode system that could fully read and analyze the DNA of a race.

The headquarter of Muspelheim, Asgard, was located in the mountains six miles north of Asheville, North Carolina, near Mount. Mitchell. From the outside, Asgard was just a five-story high concrete building in the forest, but it contained one of the most advanced laboratories and some apparatuses that existed only in this building. Nearly 40 engineers and 20 scientists worked directly in Asgard, and the rest were scattered around in different bases of Muspelheim.

Hiccup Haddock, 18 years old, became the youngest but most talented engineer that Muspelheim had. The president of Muspelheim, Mr. Timothy, personally interviewed him and hired him right after Hiccup graduated from high school. To Muspelheim, Mr. Timothy never made mistakes, and he was like a prophet to this company. He brought Muspelheim back from downfalls like how Franklin Roosevelt pulled the U.S. out of the Great Depression Many engineers doubted Mr. Timothy's decision about Hiccup, but they had been forced to shut up due to Hiccup's outstanding performances.

The first project that Hiccup encountered was to design and create an exoskeleton that a group of mercenaries ordered to empower themselves. They paid seventy hundred thousand dollars and would glad to pay more if needed, but they wanted to receive a completely elite and unique product from Muspelheim. Hiccup was an assistant engineer in that project, but he created a key system that allowed the exoskeleton to carry computers, tracking device, environment sensors, arms, and even entertaining system, totally transcending the preconceived idea that an exoskeleton was nothing but a man-made muscle.

After that project, judgments toward Hiccup were changed. Engineers no longer view him as "a mistake of Mr. Timothy", but as one of the brightest engineers in this company. Mr. Timothy assigned Main Engineer Gobber the Belch as Hiccup's advisor and superior.

Main Engineer didn't directly work with one project, but he was in charge of all engineer in Muspelheim. Gobber was one of the founders of Muspelheim and a close friend of Mr. Timothy. His expertise and experience in engineering were the core of this company. Other technology companies tried to hire him, even gave him triple the benefits, but Gobber remained loyal to Muspelheim. Despite Gobber's cursing problem, he was a man that any laboratory needed. Mr. Timothy tried to help Gobber solve the problem, but it was pretty hard to alter someone's speaking routine when that person had been using that routine for more than thirty years. He could design a new airplane in a few hours, create an intelligent computer program in a few days, and even figure out ways to reshape the structure of atoms and molecules to form new materials that were not on the periodic table.

Under the directs and advice from Gobber, Hiccup partnered up with another brilliant engineer, Fishlegs Ingerman. This young duo was a legend of Muspelheim, and they earned the respect and fame in just a few months. Their contribution to Muspelheim bypassed most of the engineers that had worked here for their lives. Their lab was located on the fourth floor of Asgard with a great view of the forest and the Appalachian Mountains. To Hiccup and Fishlegs, there was nothing that couldn't be solved by the power of engineering, and everything was just the problem of correct constructions and materials. There were rumors about Hiccup and Fishlegs as well. Sometimes people talked about Hiccup and Fishlegs put a micro-computers in their heads to assist them during engineering. Others believed that Hiccup was actually a member of the Timothy family. Because of how close Hiccup and Fishlegs worked with each other, someone even said that they were gay.

"You guys already started fooling around, so I suppose your project is done?" Gobber questioned.

"No, sir, we were just trying to release some stresses and anxieties," Fishlegs replied.

"Then keep working," Gobber examined the duo's in-process project which was placed carelessly on a table. "How is this supposed to be an invisible suit, or electrical cloaking technology?"

"Just wait and see, Mr. Main Engineer. You'll get the invisible suit… I mean electronic cloaking technology in time," Hiccup confidently flipped through a few pages on his clipboard. "Do you want to take a look at our progress?"

"No, I'm good. I still have another twenty-five teams to talk to. I can't spend all of my time with this electronic cloaking," Gobber said as he walked towards the door. Then he stopped, and turned around, "Just a reminder, tomorrow a group of clients will come to Asgard. They'll visit your lab and see how smart you are, so better clean up this god damned mess. "

"Just like usual," Fishlegs shrugged.

"Oh, one more thing," Gobber added quickly. "The security team will be around during the visit. Seems like these customers aren't messing around. So, good luck."

Discomforts crept up the duo's faces. They traded a few complains and started cleaning their lab.

Muspelheim had three divisions: Engineering and science, treasury, and security. The engineering and science division was the largest and most important division, and of course, they were the core of this company. The Main Engineer, highest possible level of an engineer in Muspelheim, was the leader of this division. The treasury division was in charge of the money of course. They needed to make sure that Muspelheim was running smoothly without going bankrupt, and they reported directly to the president, Mr. Timothy.

Due to the intense competition in this field and the advancement of Muspelheim, some other tech companies or associations might be thinking of sending spies to steal classified data or research products from Muspelheim. A few years ago, a Muspelheim engineer was murdered in his house because his research product was almost dominating the market and the field. In order to solve problems like this, Muspelheim officially created the security division, which was responsible for the security of vital information and engineers of Muspelheim.

Right now the security division had 55 guards, all from military or private security companies. Lead Security Officer, Helga Ragnardóttir, was in charge of this division. She was a former SAS lieutenant, an Icelander born in England, a beautiful attractive blonde that had a large number of males who wanted to win her hands. Muspelheim hired Helga seven years ago when SAS kicked her out due to threatening another officer physically because he said something that offended her family. Helga did not have patience and generosity within her. In SAS, her soldiers gave her the nickname "Hel". This nickname remained with her after she came to Muspelheim.

"I don't trust those shitty security guards," Hiccup commented boldly.

"The guards… oh," After realizing what Hiccup was talking about, Fishlegs signed. "I know, but they are doing their best. You know that they only have 55 guards and there are around 150 engineers in this company."

"Anyway, it doesn't matter," Hiccup threw his clipboard onto a table.

"All right, if you say so."

* * *

Nearly 10 pm, Hiccup arrived at his house five miles away from Asgard, in a typical country community where everyone knew everyone. At night, the community was so quiet that after shutting down his car engine, Hiccup couldn't even hear the sound of pedestrians or crickets. He hopped down his sky blue Ford and turned his head towards the south, the direction of downtown Asheville. He used to have an idea of going to the downtown and see what everyone was doing. But he chickened out, he was too antisocial for that.

Fishlegs loved to visit downtown once in awhile. He said that he needed to refresh his mind from engineering, and downtown was a great place for that. There were restaurants, theaters, and waves of people at night that you might need to wait an hour for a movie.

Each time, after Fishlegs finished his long tale of how downtown was so awesome, Hiccup would always comment indifferently: "Sure."

Hiccup shook his head, trying to eliminate some useless thoughts in his mind. He walked towards the entrance and unlocked the steel door of a small, brick-walled house that seemed like an old fashioned British dwelling. Hiccup entered the house and closed the door behind him. His living room contained just two sofas, a table, and a few lights on the ceiling. The only thing that stood out was the walls. The walls were covered by data sheets, vital information, graphs and pictured filled with notes, and research results. Almost every day when Hiccup returned, he would tape one sheet onto the wall, showing that he overcame another obstacle in engineering. The walls were also his "reflection center": almost everyday after coming back from work, he paced before the papers and creating scientific models in his head, calculating the goods and bads of his work.

Half dozen pictures rested on a table. Hiccup protected these pictures with frames like protecting a fragile baby. One picture was Hiccup and Fishlegs standing in their lab smiling at the camera after Hiccup unveiled his talents in engineering. Another one was Hiccup and a six feet seven man with thick, brown beard wearing white lab coat standing in front of the entrance of Asgard. In that picture, the man put his beefy hands on Hiccup's shoulders like father and son. The pictures formed in a circle on the table, surrounding the picture among them. The frame of that picture illuminated under light, and the picture presented a boy and a girl, both around seven-year-old, sat in the backyard of a house, bathing in the sunlight on a flat, open grass field and an oak tree in the corner. The girl sat behind the boy so that she could cuddle the boy in her arms and rest her jaw on his shoulder. Unlike the boy whose auburn hair was untidy and tangled up like a bird nest, the girl neatly braided her blond hair into a ponytail behind her head.

Hiccup gently picked up that picture with his left hand as if he was afraid that he might break it, and examined the duo in the picture. He gently ran his thumb across the face of the girl in the picture. He smiled.

* * *

**To be continued**


	2. Chapter 2

**Hi everyone! Here I'm giving a big thank you for all readers of this story. Please enjoy chapter two of "Project Bifrost".**

* * *

Chapter 2:

Meanwhile, in a small, one-floor building that was constantly overlooked by pedestrians sixty miles away from Hiccup's house, a dozen of people, dresses in dark blue uniforms and bore a black badge with the letters "DPA" on their arms, sat in front of a forty-two inches screen. From the outside, this house was nothing more than a typical, one-floor dwelling of a family, but it contained some of the best special agents on this continent.

"For our first order of business, 'Heimdall'. They are acting more frequently and more violently," A woman around fifty-year-old, stood in front of her team. Her hair reached her waist, mixing with a few locks of silver hair. Unlike the dark blue uniform that her team wore, hers was beige. On her belt, located a sixteen-inch-long, Second World War bayonet resting in a sheath. The screen behind her was playing a black and white video, the time on the up left corner was 10:10 pm. "Twenty-four hours ago, a security camera caught a glimpse of the leader of Heimdall, Axl McDowell, and his assistant, Evan, sneaked into a storage room of a technology company and copied some key data."

The lights were off and the curtains were closed, so the only source of illumination was the screen. Some people were paying attention to the speaker and constantly taking notes on their notebooks, but others… not so much.

"Do you think we should…" a young agent that just became an adult whispered at a blonde that sat beside him and rested his left hand on her right shoulder.

"Snotlout! If your dirty hand that has been in too many G-strings dare touch me again, your hand won't be touching anything else." the blonde warned sharply and coldly while trying to keep her voice low.

"You know, Astrid," withdrawing his hand, Snotlout's mouth curved into a smile. "Since you haven't interacted with a boy before, I have a way to let you…"

"Snotlout, you know this won't work, right?" a male agent sat behind Snotlout whispered. H braided his long hair under his chin, announcing that he had a beard. "If you are trying to impress a spitfire like Astrid, the best way is not to do so."

"Shut your pathetic mouth up, Tuffnut. I'll show you the right way of how to deal with Astrid," Snotlout eyed him confidently.

"Agent Tuffnut Thorston, Primary Agent Snotlout Jorgenson, and Primary Agent Astrid Hofferson, is there a problem?" the speaker paused the video and turned on the lights.

Usually, when someone's name was called in a group, all people would look at them, but in this room, no one was paying attention to what had happened.

"Here we go…" someone murmured.

"You see, Valka, I think we need to improve the unity of this team, and someone's bad attitude," Snotlout stood up and replied loudly.

Everyone laughed.

"I just asked you a question, agent!" Valka, who was the leader of this team, raised her tone. "Is there a problem?"

"No," Snotlout relented. "Everything is under control."

"Well, right now I need to say something really quick," Tuffnut raised from his chair and cleared his throat, like a celebrity who was preparing to give a public speech. "I want all of you to know that Primary Agent Snotlout Jorgenson is in love with Primary Agent Astrid Hofferson."

"What the… that's not true! You made that up!"

"Well, according to your heartbeat and the amount of adrenaline that your body produced," a girl who seated besides Tuffnut stood up, holding a laptop in her hand. "And according to your unusual vital signs and electroencephalogram, I'm pretty sure that Snotlout has a crush on Astrid… no… Snotlout wants Astrid to be in his bed."

The whole room howled with laughter. Everyone "oohed" and teased Snotlout. One agent even yelled: "Way to go, Snot-face!"

"If you dare to even think about laying me, I swear I'll chop down your lunatic head," Astrid pointed at Snotlout and yelled.

"Ruffnut, how the hell do you know my vital signs?" Snotlout turned to the girl.

"Well, you remember a year ago, when you got infected by some diseases and took some medicine? I put a biosensor in your pills."

"You've been tracking me for a year?" Snotlout was stunned.

"Yeah. That was not a difficult job, you know."

"Screw you, asshole. I want that sensor out of my body right now!"

"Order!" Valka bellowed. Her voice spread across the room like a tornado, making some people to even quivered lightly. "Everyone shut the fuck up or you all go and run ten miles."

After Valka finished her sentence, the room suddenly fell into silence. Agents looked at each other, knowing that they really triggered their team leader.

"Moving on. Echo team was called into action. They chased Axl and Evan for twenty miles but got ambushed by the remaining members of 'Heimdall', Eva, David, and Erik Frederic. Four members of Echo were injured, one KIA," Valka said, her voice contained some sadness.

"Echo is the most elite and best team DPA has. They have twelve men to fight against five but still lost one. Heimdall's ability and power is growing at a much higher pace than we predicted," a female agent pointed out.

"That's right, Heather," Valka replied. "Heimdall's sponsor, Erik Fredric also participated during the ambush."

DPA, Direct Protection Agency, was a half governmental, half private organization that partnered with all sorts of investigation agencies like CIA, and had a close connection with Interpol. They assisted these agencies during investigations, information collections, and field actions. Half a decade ago, DPA and CIA together brought down a criminal organization that had threatened the borders of the U.S. They also could be hired by customers to provide protections. Their members were all former military, mercenary, or even special force. DPA contained ten teams, each had twelve to twenty members. The teams were named after the military alphabet. Two teams, Alpha and Bravo, were in charge of information and coordination. One team, Charlie, controlled the supplies and techs. Seven teams, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, and Juliet, were responsible for all missions and actions that DPA received.

Valka, a former SWAT leader, was the leader of team Foxtrot. Comparing to other team leaders, Valka's prior job was mediocre, but she was famous for her leadership and communication skills. Foxtrot had ten agents including Valka herself. This team was founded half a century ago and was one of the first teams to be established. Right now, their mission was to eliminate "Heimdall". Even though this mission had lasted for more than three years, breaking the longest mission record in DPA's history, which was not something to be proud of, team Foxtrot still received a lot of respects from other teams.

"Heimdall" was a mysterious mercenary group that had been chased by numerous intelligence agencies worldwide, including CIA, Interpol, MI6, and even Mossad, for more than two decades. People who could hire Heimdall were usually warlords who wanted another warlord to be killed, an insurgent group who needed an assistant during an anti-government war, or some not-so-good politicians who needed to assassinate other politicians. Heimdall received all kinds of dirty, inhuman, sinister, and heartless missions. A few years ago, a warlord paid Heimdall two million dollars cash to massacre all men, women, and children of a village, around 2500 and cut down their heads because the warlord suspected that village provided shelter and supplies for his archenemy.

Even though Heimdall only had four members and one partner, intelligence agencies around the world just could not catch their preys. The commander of Heimdall, Axl McDowell, was the son of a former SEAL. He was six feet one, with short, light blond hair that looked like some golden spikes on someone's head. A five-inch-long scar was located on his neck, and he got that scar from a bullet that almost pierced through his throat. When Axl was just twelve, he won the world champion of kickboxing. He became a Delta Force member when he was nineteen, and served for Delta for around five years. Interpol issued a five million dollars prize for whoever could catch Axl McDowell and turn him in.

Axl's team included his second-in-command Nina, who was a fearless, talented in the art of killing, but an extremely beautiful female warrior who was very open with sexuality, was a genius hacker and mechanic. There were rumors about she laid with every Heimdall member. The other two members were David and Evan. David was a veteran of the 10th mountain division. Received his education from Stanford, Evan was the only one in Heimdall that could solve engineering problems.

Heimdall's partner, Eric Frederic, was a former member of Heimdall. He was Axl's close friend and fought with him shoulder to shoulder in combat. Eric was also a billionaire, a public figure, and a politician with a lot of power. When Heimdall got themselves into serious problems, it was usually Eric who got them out.

All four members of Heimdall were top wanted. Their names were always at the top of "World Top 10 Bad Guys". More than fifty agents, police, soldiers, and private detectives were killed while trying to capture Heimdall.

"So, what's the plan? We go after them?" Heather asked.

"Yes. Echo team encountered them by accident. It's our mission to bring them down," Valka replied. "One more thing, tomorrow me, Astrid, Snotlout, Ruffnut, and Tuffnut will visit a private technology company called 'Muspelheim'. I just received another mission from the top command that we need to go there, and buy something."

"You mean we go shopping?" Tuffnut jumped up. "That's going to be fun! Can I smash everything?"

"No, Tuffnut, you are not going to smash everything," Valka sighed with frustration. "We are the only team who has extra people to do this. It'll only take half a day. We go there, talk to their engineers, place our order, and then get out. After a couple of days, we go back and see their progress. They'll call us when they are done."

"How much money do we need?" Ruffnut raised her hand.

"Top command will give us around two million, and another two million for back up. Right now even though I know what we are going to buy because Top command gave me a brief description, I'm so confused with those technological terms," Valka held up some printed pages and passed them around for everyone to read.

"What the hell are we reading? This does make any sense!" Snotlout shouted as he impatiently flipped through the pages. "What's 'transcending the natural matters and create homo sapiens to BEC connection'?"

"You think I know what this shit is talking about? I'm not a scientist."

* * *

At the same time, in Asgard, Gobber sat in Mr. Timothy's office. This office was located on the top floor of Asgard, the headquarter of Muspelheim. If Asgard was the heart of Muspelheim, then Mr. Timothy's office acted like the chambers in the heart, controlling the blood flow of a body.

Mr. Timothy didn't like to be formal. He never wore a suit, didn't like people to call him "Mr. Timothy", and when he talked to visitors in his office, they always sat on some couches or even just standing around.

"I read the description. DPA sent it to me a few hours ago. Let Hiccup handle this project. It's time for him to receive some serious challenges," Mr. Timothy said to his Main Engineer Gobber as they enjoyed their late dinner in the office.

"But, Mr. Timothy, this is related to his father," after swallowing a piece of salmon, Gobber pointed out.

"First of all, my friend, for the one million time, don't call me Mr. Timothy."

"Sorry, Sam," Gobber quickly corrected himself.

Samuel Timothy was Mr. Timothy's full name. Even though he came from New York, he had a very deep British accent. When people asked him about his voice, he always said that his teacher was from England. Being as a president for a technology company, Mr. Timothy, or Sam, spent more than fifteen years in different laboratories and gained a lot of first-hand experiences before he became the president.

"I guess we need to restart Project Bifrost, Gobber. If we succeed, it will be the turning point of science and technology."

* * *

**To be continued **


	3. Chapter 3

**Hi guys, I'm back to update my story again! I believe you all enjoyed this story so far, right? Yes? No?**

**anchoreddown24 - Thank you for reviewing my story, and I'll try to increase my writing speed. **

**Demetri the potato - In this ****story, Valka and Hiccup are not related. I'm really sorry if you are looking forward for a mother-son relationship. **

* * *

Chapter 3:

"Don't worry about Hiccup," Sam said confidently, replying to Gobber's concern. "He is our future."

"And where did you get that conclusion from?"Gobber questioned.

"Because when you are the last one in our family, I don't think you'll give up that easily," Sam eyed Gobber, clearly his words had a deeper meaning.

"Well then, I'll help him to get started, and Fishlegs can assist him," After scratching his head and considered for a moment, Gobber agreed.

"No, we need another person, someone that knows what Project Bifrost is actually about," Sam stood up, walked to his drawers, and dug out a hard-copied file.

"Who are you talking about?" Gobber watched Sam, intrigued.

"Emma VischKwades," Sam said as he threw the file toward Gobber.

"Emma Visch-who?" Gobber caught the file in the air and quickly scanned the title.

"VischKwades. She is the granddaughter of Hogan Don VischKwades. Right now she works in another Muspelheim laboratory in the west coast, a Top Assistant Engineer for Next Generation Aerospace Defense Project," Sam explained as he collected the dishes that he and Gobber used for dinner.

"I heard about that. Someone said it's so fucking complicated, especially for the computer programing and energy transfer. Man, those two parts are monsters. I still remember when their Lead Engineer requested for more than forty thousand computers."

"Yep, and watch out for your language," Sam warned.

"Right, right," Gobber continued scanning through the file. "Who is Hogan Don Visch… Visch… whatever the last name is."

"The previous Lead Engineer of Project Bifrost. He helped us start Bifrost and kept that project going. But he died forty-five years ago. His death was one of the reasons why we couldn't continue Bifrost. That man contained everything we needed for Bifrost," Sam sighed. "He used to be as successful as Hiccup."

"Cause of death?"

"Assassination. Four people with their faces covered broke into his lab, killed the guards and his two assistants, and pumped more than thirty rounds at him. Our ESS, or Electronic Security System, was hacked at that time, and obviously, the assassins did it."

"Assassination?"

"Another company, maybe a tech, hired four mercenaries to kill him. I don't really know why, maybe because he was too advanced in his research. Some of the key parts of Project Bifrost were too important secret that except for the Lead Engineer, no one knew. Right now those files are still locked up. I only have half of the passcode. When Hogan and his team started working on Bifrost, we didn't have the technologies that we have today, and that's why they couldn't complete whatever they were doing. Even if he didn't get assassinated, he wouldn't be able to complete the project. And for the rest of the research group... an accident blew up their lab, ended up sending the whole group to Valhalla."

"Hmmm… according to this file, I think Emma might be able to assist Hiccup. She sounds like a talented engineer, but she is only seventeen, not even an adult. Isn't she too young for this?"

"So? Age doesn't limit the expertise that a person has. Young doesn't mean inexperienced and naive. By the way, Hiccup is just eighteen, right?" Sam smiled. "I know that you taught some of the best engineers in Muspelheim, but don't think your engineers are always the best."

Gobber shrugged, "You can't find enough evidence to support your claim, can you?"

* * *

"Team two, get your butts going. I want this building secured in ten minutes! What the fuck are you doing? Get your shit and get going!" A bossy, Nordic female voice echoed across the isles of Asgard.

"Here we go. Helga's time," Fishlegs complained as he and Hiccup walked into their lab. Although they respected the Security Division, Fishlegs and Hiccup couldn't handle a female like Lead Security Officer Helga Ragnardóttir, the "alpha female", which a lot of guards called her in private. Every morning, the guards needed to thoroughly search Asgard and tried to find any possible tracks that might tell them that someone had been here before.

"What's up, Fishlegs?" a guard walked past them, holding an SRM M1216 shotgun in his hands with deft professionalism. The guards dealt with stress usually by teasing the engineers, and in return, the engineers always tried to find a way to make the guards fall down the stairs or look stupid by setting small traps in the isles. These jokes and romps took place every single day, but none of them went beyond "joking around". "Wish to have a word with Helga?"

"Shut up and get out of here, Brandt. I know that you came from 101st Airborne, but don't believe that you can do whatever you want with that shit in hand. And, it's a negative if you want to search our lab," Fishlegs replied while he and Hiccup rushed into their lab and slammed the door close.

"Fine, but you better organize your lab. Today some guests will come, so keep the trash can version of your lab covered up," Brandt the security guard laughed and walked away.

"Well, this is not our first time meeting with some guests, so I suppose you know what to do?" Hiccup asked as he unhung his white lab coat from the closet and put it on.

"All right, I don't enjoy talking to another group of strangers," looking out through the giant glass window of their lab, Fishlegs answered with indifference.

"Hiccup, the guests are arriving in ten minutes, so get your butts ready!" Gobber's voice appeared from the radio.

Hiccup reached over to his work table and grabbed the small, black radio and clicked a button: "How many representatives are coming?"

"Around four or five. Just keep in mind, some of them are pretty prepared for their trip, so don't mess things up."

* * *

"Let's get down to business," Valka placed a paper file on Hiccup's table. "Bose-Einstein Condensate."

"Bose-Einstein Condensate?" Hiccup's eyes widened with surprise, staring at the file as if the few printed pages were a bomb. He stood still for a few seconds and exchanged a worried look with Fishlegs. "You want us to create Bose-Einstein Condensate? The state of matter predicted by Nath Bose and Albert Einstein?"

The five guests with the black "DPA" badge bored on their sleeves glared at Hiccup. They nodded altogether like some cold-blood killers who finally identified their target in front of them.

But the silence didn't last long.

"What the hell is Bose-Einstein Condensate? Is it food?" Tuffnut yelled.

"It's not food. It is another state of matter beside gas, solid, liquid, and plasma," Hiccup tried to summarize his knowledge about it in a few sentences. "It's when we cool something, usually gas, super close to absolute zero. It's very cold but extremely fragile."

"Why can't we find it from Antarctica? That place is pretty cold," Ruffnut said.

"Because it's an artificial product. There are no natural places on Earth that can reach absolute zero," Fishlegs stepped forward and stood beside Hiccup.

"Anyway," Pushing the twins away, Valka pointed at the file. "We want you to create it, and weaponize it."

Fishlegs scratched his head, "Nobody tried it before. Right now it's already a miracle to just cool down something to near absolute zero."

"Then I guess you guys will be the first."

"You said you want us to weaponize it, so are you trying to kill someone with that?"

"Of course, or use it as an anti-tank, anti-aircraft, or something like that."

"Well, I already said that Bose-Einstein Condensate is extremely fragile. You can't use it physically against someone or something," Fishlegs shrugged.

"Then how about freezing something? You said that BEC is extremely cold."

"I'm not sure if it can freeze anything. In order to store it, we must put it into a specially designed container, and it can't even withstand room temperature."

While Fishlegs and Valka intensely discussed weaponizing Bose-Einstein Condensate and exchanging details about it, Hiccup scanned the people who accompanied Valka. There was a twin, a muscular man, and a blonde. When Hiccup locked his vision on the blonde, he blinked.

Unlike other visitors, the blonde wore a silver black trench coat with a belt. Using the mirror on the other side of the wall, Hiccup could see that beneath the trench coat, there was only a vest. She cocked her head and looked back at Hiccup. Clearly, she wasn't a nice girl who you could find in a theater or in a mall. Hiccup could even feel daggers shooting out from her eyes. Without even saying or gesturing anything, she created an invisible territory around her that no one was allowed to cross. Hiccup witnessed when the muscular guy tried to move closer to the blonde, she hit him in the belly with her knee.

Actually, Astrid was a little bit mentally freaked out under the engineer's awkward glance. That dude was skinny like a fishbone comparing to his oversized companion. His auburn hair was messy and even tangled up like a bird nest, but she knew that this kind of people could abruptly transform into a god when there were in a lab. She felt naked in front of him as if his vision could pierce through her clothes and directly view the inside of her. According to her personality, she would walk straight up to him and punch him in the face and yell: "Why are you fucking staring at me? I'm not a nude!"

But the two emerald eyes were so familiar to Astrid. The awkwardness was not the only thing that hit Astrid, but also warmth. Under his stare, the feeling of her parents cuddled her when she was young came back to her. Astrid searched through her mind, trying to find where and when she met those eyes before. From the outside, Astrid looked nothing except for a cold-blood, serious killer, but her emotions and thoughts were all concentrated on that engineer.

Her hands unconsciously slipped into the remolded pockets of her coat. In there, two HK MP7 Submachine guns were locked and loaded. Astrid wasn't trying to kill someone, but the only thing that could make her feel safe and protected was her weapons. She held on the handle of both guns while taking some deep breaths to calm herself.

She chose this pair of MP7 when she jointed DPA. This German submachine gun was invented based on NATO's policies and was spread to more than twenty countries. Having a similar size than a pistol, MP7 could both create a wall of bullets by a ROF of 950 rounds per minute and hide easily under jackets or coats for secret missions. Astrid's MP7s were customized: the handles were designed only for her grip, a red dot sight and Picatinny rail were mounted on both guns, and the extended barrels increased the accuracy and effective range of the bullets.

"Please hold it right there, lady," Helga violently pushed the door open and stepped into Hiccup's lab pointing at Astrid, followed by a team from Muspelheim Security Division. The guards took out their standard combination of SRM 1216 shotguns, FN P90 Submachine guns, and Glock 18 pistols and surrounded the visitors.

"What? What the heck is going on?" Fishlegs protested. "We are trying to talk about science and technology. We don't need those stupid… shooting pieces of shits during a science talk."

"Put your hands at where we can see it!" Helga commanded as her FN P90 pointed at Astrid. She totally ignored Fishlegs's objection.

"Nice trick," Astrid said carelessly as she pulled her hands out. She wasn't afraid of the guards. Before they came, they already studied the security system of Asgard. The guards were pros, but Astrid was confident that if a gunfight broke out, they would win.

"Trick yourself, asshole," Helga said as she approached towards Astrid.

"Helga, stop what you are doing and get your men out of there," Samuel Timothy's voice crackled from Helga's radio.

"Sam, they are armed, and there is a possibility that one of them is trying to use their arms," Helga replied.

"That doesn't matter. I want this trade to be a peaceful one," TImothy's voice was low but powerful and forceful. "Not a bloody one."

"Yes, Sam," After a few seconds of hesitation, Helga withdrew her P90 loathly and turned to her guards. "Let's move. I believe this time Mr. Timothy doesn't want us to disrupt his favorite engineer and project."

"Motion detectors," Fishlegs explained after the guards left the lab, not willing for Helga to hear this. "Every movement in this room is detected and analyzed by a system of fourteen motion detectors. I'm not sure why you did that, but I'm sure that you were reaching for your arms?"

"How do you know that I have arms?" Astrid asked, but the question was more like a challenge.

"Metal detectors and infrared cameras."

"How much do you think it'll cost?" Valka asked, totally ignoring the fact that a gunfight almost broke out in the lab. Valka wouldn't be affected by her surrounding environment. After she focused on something, no disturbances could catch her attention.

"Four million, minimum," Fishlegs took out a calculator from his pocket and punched some numbers.

"That's a lot."

"I get it, but in order to create BEC, we need a lot of energy to decrease the movements of molecules, and in order to use it as an arm, we need to find a way for it to withstand room temperature by itself… Anyway, it's very complicated. Do you have other requirements or limits?"

"No, just make some Bose-Einstein Condensate and weaponize it. Easy, right? You can do things your way."

"It…it's actually not easy," Fishlegs corrected her. "But I guess we can make it work."

* * *

After parking his Ford into his driveway, Hiccup dashed into his house and ran to the table covered by photos. He couldn't wait to confirm his prediction. He lost track of her for more than seven years. Was it faith that brought her back to him again? He picked up the middle photo, the one with a young boy and a young girl.

"Oh my…it's really you," Hiccup murmured as tears landed dripped down his cheek and landed on the table.

He plopped onto the floor with the photo in hand. His hands trembled and muscles spasmed as if he was undergoing a panic attack. Well, the thing that he was experiencing was no different from a panic attack.

* * *

**To be continued**

**Just for a reminder: certain technological and scientific facts and descriptions were created or changed for the purposes of dramatization.**

**The writer of this story (that's me) is**** _not_ an engineer or scientist.**


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4:

"C' mon, try to catch up!" a nine-year-old boy ran across the beach barefooted at the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, leaving a trail of footsteps like small craters on the beach behind him, laughing and waving his arms in the wind. The vast Atlantic Ocean was next to him with a few sailboats floating on the water. The waves sparkled under the sunlight, seagulls with snow-white fur circled above the ocean, searching for fish that hid beneath the water.

The boy's auburn hair bounced when his bare feet touched the ground. A light blue, oversized jacket reached to his knees like a dress and almost stumbled him over multiple times. His emerald eyes reflected the sunlight.

A nine-year-old girl chased behind the boy, creating another trail of footsteps on the sand. She braided her blond hair into a ponytail behind her head. She wore an MUSC t-shirt and naval blue shorts, also barefooted.

"Hiccup, slow down!" the girl yelled. She stopped, and placed her hands on her knees, breathing in the fresh air from the ocean to refill her lungs.

"Really? I know that you are better than this, Astrid," Hiccup paused as well. He walked back to the tired girl, sweat drifted down from her forehead and passed her ice blue eyes.

"We ran all the way from the other side of the beach… anyway, you should join the cross-country team," Astrid panted heavily, resting her hands on her knees

"All right, we'll walk."

"That's more like it."

The two kids sauntered along the ocean, hand in hand, chilly water washed their bare feet. They were alone on the beach, most of the visitors already went home during this time period. They walked for more than ten minutes without encountering a human being. A roll of dense palm trees separated them from the noisy street.

"Do you think your father know that we are… dating each other?" Astrid asked.

"No, he doesn't," Hiccup replied confidently. "He is too busy working with other engineers. And, he only knows that we are friends, but not in a romantic way."

"Do you think he'll ever know?"

"That depends on how well we keep that hidden."

The duo kept walking while auburn and blond hair swang in the cool wind, until a watchtower came into view. White, blue and red stripes on the walls made the tower like a U.S. flag. A steel falcon statue on the top of the tower reflected the bright evening sunlight, creating an illusion that this coastline has been protected by a sentinel.

Hiccup found a blanket in front of the tower. He and Astrid took this blanket from Hiccup's father, Stoick, and hid it under the balcony of this watchtower. This blanket could easily keep two lovebirds warm beneath it. In order to keep this blanket away from dust, Hiccup put it into a translucent, sealable plastic bag and used a stone as a weight so that the wind wouldn't blow it away.

Astrid took out the blanket from the bag and spread it on the sand to make a clean and flat place for them to sit on. After the boy and the girl made themselves comfortable, the young Astrid cuddled Hiccup, wrapping her arms around his chest and rested her jaw on his shoulder.

The sun struggled to make its last appearance of the day, iridescent lights transformed the horizon into a palette with colors of red, orange, and yellow. No noise of car engines, factories, or traffics could be heard from this pristine, secluded beach. The sounds of seagulls squawking and waves splashing dominated the beach.

"I'm cold," As the wind started to pick up, Astrid cuddled Hiccup even closer, trying to warm herself by her companion's body heat. She untied her hair and spread them alone her shoulders. Under the evening sunlight, her blond hair looked more like golden straws.

"I can see that. I told you not to just wear a t-shirt and…that," Hiccup pointed at Astrid's legs.

Astrid's shorts was not really age appropriate for a nine-year-old girl. It didn't even reach her thumb if she put her arms at her side.

"What's the big deal? We even took showers together, and you know that I don't care if right now I'm naked in front of you."

Hiccup took off his jacket and helped Astrid to put it on. The wind blocker jacket could keep Astrid's shivering body away from the cool temperature. She lay down on the blanket and rested her head on Hiccup's laps, and instead of watching the breathtaking sunset, she concentrated on the two emerald eyes above her.

Hiccup caressed his girlfriend, rubbing her scalp and running his fingers through her blond hair. Astrid moved closer to Hiccup so that she could indulge his gentle touch.

"You don't like it?" Hiccup asked after realizing that Astrid's vision trailed off from the sunset.

"Oh, I love sunset. It lets me know that no one can remain its dominant position, but…" Astrid paused for a moment, staring at Hiccup. "I love you more."

They met each other five years ago when a four-year-old Hiccup moved to Charleston with his father, Stoick. As Hiccup's neighbor and the only child in the community who was Hiccup's age, Astrid had quickly become Hiccup's close friend. When Astrid got into trouble, Hiccup would always be the first one to help her out, and Hiccup knew that Astrid would never leave his side. They went to the same school, hanged out with each other every single day, and sometimes Astrid would even sneak out from her house at night, ran to Hiccup's house with a blanket wrapped around her, and spent the night with Hiccup.

Their community was located very near to the coast. From Hiccup's balcony, he could see the Atlantic Ocean and a beach. The beach had become their "designated hang out" spot for every weekend. They would walk on the sand, swim in the clear water, and watch the sunset when all the tourists were gone.

After three years, another type of relationship had started to replace their friendship. This all began with when Astrid faintly confessed to Hiccup that she had a crush on him since they met each other.

"You remember the day when you said you have a crush on me? I was… terrified," Hiccup said, gazing at the ocean.

"What?" Astrid sat up, facing Hiccup. She put her hands on Hiccup's shoulders and looked him in the eye. "Tell me why."

"Because… I didn't know what would've happened to our friendship. Before I moved to Charleston, I spent most of my time in my father's lab, so I didn't have any friends. My father's co-workers used to play with me, but I felt that they were using and treating me as an entertainment tool or toy instead of a friend," Hiccup looked down at his hands. "I did not get the chance to interact with other people. 'Friendship' used to be an unfamiliar concept to me."

"I only know that you didn't have a lot of friends before you moved here. I… I don't know the problem was that extreme."

"Yeah… anyway, it doesn't matter now."

Hiccup looked up, finding out that Astrid's ice blue eyes were gazing at him, worried.

"I just want to say," Hiccup added. This time, both of them looked at each other in the eye. "I don't want our relationship to end. You are my only companion in this world. Well, except for my dad."

"You don't have to change your word choice in front of me and hide your thoughts. I know what you are thinking and what you were trying to say," Astrid giggled. "I love you too."

Astrid leaned forward, gently placing a kiss on Hiccup's lips. Even though they had been kissing each other for years, this thing would never get old for these two. Astrid didn't care about "age appropriate" or whatnot. She did whatever she felt like so. If she felt she should punch someone, then she would punch someone, and if she felt she should kiss someone, then she would kiss someone.

Hiccup heard rumors from other older kids and adults in the community about Astrid: from the outside, Astrid looked like a cute little girl, but for some strange reasons, she became sexually mature and active at a pretty young age, so sometimes Hiccup was afraid about whether he would get himself laid or something. But that never happened.

Even though Astrid never fucked Hiccup when their ages were still in single digit, but bruises, or hickeys, were common on Hiccup's neck, so Hiccup had to wear high collar clothes to cover them up.

"Ahhh… that was a terrible one," Astrid brushed her hair away from her face while criticizing herself. "Forget about it. I'll give you another one later."

"No, that was… that was amazing."

"Whatever… humph…" before Astrid could turn away from her boyfriend, Hiccup grabbed on her arm and pulled her back and covered her mouth with his lips. Hiccup's tongue swiped across Astrid's lower lip, causing her to moan into him.

Astrid felt that Hiccup would've sucked her up, but she didn't try to resist it. She actually liked it. She leaned in, wrapped her arms around his neck.

"If your parents see us doing this, we are all screwed," when their mouths departed, both of them gasped for fresh air.

"Maybe," Astrid replied to Hiccup's concern. She ran her fingers alone Hiccup's jaw and down his neck. She pushed Hiccup back forcefully that he actually landed face up on the blanket. Before Hiccup could sit up again, Astrid straddled on his body and pinned his wrists beside his head. She looked down at him seductively. "Man, you are concerning too much. I'll defend you if they want to beat you up or something. And, nobody is going to see us here."

"Are you trying to…" Hiccup tried to wriggle himself lose but with his wrists pinned down and Astrid on top of him, his escape plan didn't go out so well.

"Ok, ok, you are not thinking about… that, right?" Hiccup resisted. "We are only nine."

"Oh, don't you worry. Right now I don't want to have sex with you. I'm just enjoying our time right now," the blonde whispered by Hiccup's ear.

"In a sexual way?"

"Sort of, but not really. Do you exercise a lot? Even though you are just nine, but you have some muscles," Astrid smirked.

"And you don't sound and act like a nine-year-old when you are trying to get me out of my clothes, right?" Hiccup pointed at his jacket.

"If you don't mind."

"Since when did I mind this?"

After receiving his permission, Astrid straddled on Hiccup and unzipped his jacket inch by inch. This scene happened quite often to them as well, Hiccup liked to take showers, and he took a shower almost every day. When Stoick came back late at night, which he always did, Astrid would usually join Hiccup in the shower.

Astrid took off his jacket and tossed it aside carelessly, and his shirt quickly joined with his jacket. He shivered when the cold air directly contacted with his exposed upper body, trying to protect himself from the low temperature by crossing his arms.

"No, allow me," Astrid whispered as she pushed his arms aside.

"But it's cold...oh."

Astrid quickly removed her shirt and covered his body with hers. The instant body contact let Hiccup to spasm beneath. Hiccup's hand reached for hers, fingers laced together tightly. Hiccup kissed the back of Astrid's ear and sucked it gently, the spot which he knew would give Astrid the greatest pleasure. Astrid moaned and arched her body into his, hardened nipples pressing into his chest.

"Do you want these to go off as well?" Astrid asked as she tugged his waistband.

"No, I'm good. I think this is already good enough. We can do that when we get back," Hiccup traced his hand down her spine. "My dad won't be back till midnight."

The duo tangled up with each other. Behind them, the sun disappeared behind the horizon, darkness swallowed the beach.

* * *

Hiccup opened his eyes, sunlight penetrated through his bedroom window and formed into multiple columns in the room. The sound of birds shrieking woke Hiccup. It was almost nine o'clock in the morning.

The memory of him and Astrid came back to him during his sleep. After around seven years without any information and communication from her, Hiccup finally met his only childhood companion again. He raised himself from the bed and walked to the window. From there, he could see the vast Appalachian Mountain, hawks circled beyond the community, searching for food in the forest. He rubbed his face, trying to grasp recall the time he spent with Astrid.

Astrid vanished from his life just half a year after the beach scene. It was after a trip that he and Stoick traveled to Texas to visit another engineer. When they got back to Charleston, Astrid's house was empty. He didn't really know what happened to her and her family. According to her neighbors, Astrid and her family moved to somewhere in Virginia, but they didn't know the exact city. Hiccup sent emails to her parents and tried to call her, but no one responded to the emails and nobody picked up the phone calls.

Hiccup quickly got dressed, put on his white lab coat, and grabbed a cheese stick from his fridge as his breakfast. The cameras in his lab must have captured the facial appearances of yesterday's visitors, and he could use the facial identification system that Muspelheim had to i.d. Astrid. When he walked toward his car, thinking about the time he spent with Astrid, his phone rang in his pocket.

"Hey, Hiccup, you are late today," Fishlegs's voice came out from the speaker as Hiccup picked up the call. "C' mon, we need to get started on this thing. I was in the lab all night, searching for some information about BEC, and my conclusion is that this project is a big piece of shit to deal with."

"Ok, I will be there in ten minutes, but I need to go to Sam's office before I meet you the lab," Hiccup replied as he hung up the phone.

Hiccup's Ford followed a paved road into the Appalachian Mountains and reached Asgard, the headquarter of Muspelheim. Sycamores and northern red oaks filled the mountains and surrounded this road and the building, creating a totally secluded and peaceful environment for the engineers to work with. The density of trees provided a natural camouflage that even the satellites in space could not find this road. Usually, wildlife like deers and foxes were the only pedestrians on this road. These curious animals loved to observe the weird box-like creatures that could run at high speed without stopping.

He drove his car pass three guards and into a small parking lot beside Asgard. Hiccup always loitered beside the trees for a while after he parked his car, trying to get some fresh air in his lungs before work. But this time, he directly strode into the building.

"Check this out, isn't that Hiccup the mechanic?" The guard who stood by the entrance of Asgard teased Hiccup as he entered.

"Yeah, this time he looks a little bit depressed," another guard added. He laughed. "What? You broke up with your girlfriend?"

Before, only one guard was responsible for the main entrance of Asgard, but a couple of months ago, a group of deers in the forest decided to rush the entrance because some engineers were having a blow-out pizza party in Asgard. Even though the guard stopped some deers by a tranquilizer gun, still five deers ran into the building and messed everything up.

After that incident, Helga, Muspelheim's Lead Security Officer, decided to put two guards by the entrance instead of one and another group patrolling outside of Asgard.

"Oh, just shut up you two," Hiccup replied, annoyed. "And you know what, that P90 in your hand is already a useless metal."

"This," the first guard held up his P90. "This is not a useless metal. P90 is one of the best self-defense weapons in the world. A fifty round magazine can deal with all the problems that you have."

"Blah, blah, blah. Try to fire it."

The guard raised his weapon, unlocked the safe, and pointed it confidently at a tree nearby. As he squeezed the trigger, the gun didn't fire. Instead, the gun disassembled itself. The firing pin, ejector spring, fire selector, and all parts of the gun fell to the ground.

"What the fuck…" the guard looked at the ground, surprised.

"Yeah, buddy," Hiccup laughed, waving a bag of screws before him. "Better check your weapon before using it."

When Hiccup stepped into Samuel Timothy's office, Sam looked like he was focusing on some paperwork. But when Hiccup walked closer to him, he found out that he was leaning aside in his chair, half asleep. Documents and papers covered his desk, his computer was on, but it automatically switched to "sleep" because no one has been using it.

"Uh, Sam? Are you ok?" Hiccup asked carefully.

"What… " when Hiccup's voice reached his ears, Sam instantly sat up, blinked his eyes multiple times. "Oh, hi, Hiccup. Yeah, I'm good. The paperwork is killing me. I spent all last night trying to finish them, but as you can see, but I failed. We lost two hundred thousand dollars last night."

"What happened?"

"A project that reached to the testing and assessing stage failed. It was one of Gobber's project, next-generation autopilot, nuclear-powered aircraft," Sam handed a paper to Hiccup.

"Gobber failed? Isn't he the modern day Hephaestus or something?"

"Well, you engineers only need to deal with one project at a time, but as the Main Engineer, Gobber needs to deal with five, or more, and keep the Engineering Division in a good shape."

"Anyway, this is the test report, right?" Hiccup said as he quickly scanned through it. "Flight sensors, engines, and auto-pilot didn't screw up, so technically this aircraft can fly. I believe the problem is the nuclear reactor: preventing the reactor from overheating could be a challenge. Gobber's reactor generates too many neutrons, so he needs more cadmium rods to control the reactor. Also, it's pretty complicated to squeeze everything that a reactor needs into an aircraft, so that means you won't have much space left for other things."

"Smart kid," Sam smiled with admire. "I know Muspelheim can count on you. Anyway, do you need anything?"

"I just have a small question."

"Sure."

"I know you guys already did facial identifications. You do that for every visitor. All I'm asking is the result of facial i.d., and some other information about them would be helpful as well."

* * *

**To be continued**

**I****t took me around a week to finish this one, and it is the longest one yet. ****Hopefully you enjoyed this chapter.**


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5:

"Why do you need it?" Sam asked.

"Just… I just want to know what kind of people that I'm dealing with," Hiccup scratched his hair.

"All right," Sam turned on his laptop and opened a file. The file contained five pictures of five different people captured by the cameras in Hiccup's lab. He revolved the screen of his laptop and showed Hiccup the photos."So, who do you want to know first?"

"The blond girl who almost caused a gun fight."

"Let's see…" Sam said as he clicked on the photo. "Facial identification system is on… connecting to internet…go green...hmmm…ok, here we go: her name is Astrid Hofferson, 18 years old, and was born in Charleston, South Carolina. She graduated from Olympus-Alveresz Junior Officer Training Camp, Class of 2016, a private professional military training camp for 12 to 16 year old boys and girls. Right now she works for DPA, Direct Protection Agency, a half governmental, half private agency… hey! Where are you going?"

Before Sam could finish Astrid's descriptions, Hiccup turned around, dashed out from the office, leaving a bewildered CEO alone. He ran all the way down the corridor, trying to avoid eye contact with everyone. Engineers and guards all stopped and turned their heads and watched the crazy man, whispering at each other.

"What the fuck?" A guard said.

After reaching the end of the corridor, Hiccup leaned on the wall, staring blankly at the ceiling. He didn't care what job Astrid had, how good or bad her life was, and whether or not she got a new boyfriend. The news that Astrid showed up in front of him was all he cared about. His mouth curved into a smile, but also a drop of tear rolled down his cheek.

* * *

"What happened, Hiccup? Your eyes are all red," Fishlegs asked as Hiccup stepped into the lab.

"Nothing," Hiccup walked to the sink at a corner of their lab and rinsed his face with cold water. "Let's get to work. What did you say about BEC?"

"Oh, all right then. If you don't want to say, I don't want to know," Fishlegs took out some documents from a drawer. "They said that they want to use BEC as a weapon, but I don't see a way of doing so. You know that BEC is so fragile that we can't put it in room temperature. That means, we can't use it to kill someone or destroy something. Also, we can't use it to freeze things because even though it's close to absolute zero, but it generates too less energy."

"Those are some bad news. I know that you have been studying states of matter for years, but I studied how to build stuff for years, so in this project, you know more things than me," Hiccup flipped through the document. "Man, I don't get any of these."

"Don't worry, I'll be a good assistant."

As they talked, Gobber kicked the lab's door open. He stepped into Hiccup and Fishlegs' room followed by a brunette.

"Fishlegs, Hiccup, meet Emma VischKwades," Gobber pointed at the girl.

She wore a black vest and light blue jeans. A tattoo of Medusa's head on her right shoulder, screeching like a raged female tiger, and the green snakes of hers extended across her exposed arm. Her dark brown hair reached all the way to her waist and the bang was held up by a light green headband.

"Uh…why is she here?" Hiccup asked. He was a little bit confused. If Muspelheim got a new employee, Gobber and Sam had no reason to tell that to him and Fishlegs.

"Fishlegs, pack your stuff," Gobber grabbed a giant cardboard box and threw it to Fishlegs.

"What? Am I…fired?" Fishlegs shivered. Usually when a boss says "pack your stuff", you usually are going to lose your job.

"No, no," Gobber comforted the engineer. He patted Fishlegs' shoulders like an old man giving advice to a youngster. "You are not fired. England, you are going to Plymouth."

"In England? I'm going to England? For how long? I still need to work with Hiccup on this project."

"We established a new lab in Plymouth, and we need someone experienced to go there and act as the lead engineer," Gobber sighed. "I know this is going to be pretty hard for you, but Emma is here to replace you. She is a good girl."

Fishlegs froze there for a moment. What? He had to leave Hiccup? They were a package deal. If Fishlegs weren't there to assist Hiccup, Hiccup would never be able to reach his success. Also, Fishlegs was the only one in Muspelheim that Hiccup could work with. They have worked so closely with each other that there were some rumors in Muspelheim about Fishlegs and Hiccup were gay.

"That's bullshit," Fishlegs objected loudly, pointing at his chest. "I may be the best Assistant Engineer, and that means I stick with my Lead Engineer. I'm good with aiding an engineer, but I'm not good with leading a group of engineers."

"Used to be," Emma crossed her arms before her.

"Excuse me?" Fishlegs turned to the young brunette who had been pretty quiet.

"I'm pretty sure I'm the best Assistant Engineer," Emma said sharply.

"Hey! You two are not kids anymore!" Gobber tried to cut off the meaningless romp.

"Oh yeah?" Fishlegs laughed. "Let me see your previous project result and the final document."

"Here we go…" Hiccup murmured in the background.

Emma took out her phone from her pocket, scrolled across the screen and opened a document. She showed the document to Fishlegs.

"Next Generation Aerospace Defense Project? You were having problems with that?" Fishlegs sounded surprised as he read the document. "Look at this: your lead engineer chose to use bistatic radar with, but you decided to change the plan and use pulse-Doppler."

"Well, I believe that my plan is better than his," Emma shrugged. "He could be a little bit stubborn sometimes."

"I'm not so sure about that…Mmmm, you are focusing too much on optics."

"And why is that a problem? We need that for ground-to-air tracking scope."

Their argument lasted for more than ten minutes. Fishlegs tried his best to find drawbacks in Emma's plan, and Emma tried her best to convince Fishlegs that his "constructive criticisms" were nonsense. Hiccup watched with interest. He heard about Next Generation Aerospace Defense Project and he knew the Lead Engineer of it.

"Fishlegs, Emma, that's enough," After hearing his two engineers arguing and getting sick of it, so Gobber decided to shut it down. "Fishlegs, get your ass to England right now."

"Yeah, hit the road, genius," Emma added.

"This sounds more like I'm getting fired," Fishlegs said to Gobber. Then he turned to Emma. "Let's see how you'll survive in this lab."

Fishlegs packed his laptop, lab clothes, and some personal equipment into a box. He took out a blue USB flash drive from his pocket and placed it in Hiccup's drawer with caution as if the drive was a diamond. Gobber held the door open by his hand, waiting for Fishlegs to follow him patiently.

"Good luck, buddy. I'll visit you later. I put all the knowledge I have about the state of matter in that drive. Feel free to use it, and call me up later if you need anything explained," Fishlegs trudged to Hiccup and pulled his friend in for a hug. "She is actually pretty good, so don't get your ass kicked," Fishlegs whispered to Hiccup.

"Quick, move your oversized body, Fishlegs. Your new research team will be waiting for you in the parking lot," Gobber commanded.

After watching Fishlegs trudge out of the lab, Emma turned toward Hiccup, her dark brown eyes stared at the Lead Engineer. From the outside, she didn't look like an engineer, and Hiccup thought she was a tennis player or something when she walled into his lab. Also, not a lot of engineers wear vests and sport headbands in labs. But Hiccup trusted Fishlegs, so he wouldn't let his guard down on her.

"All right, let's get started," Gobber said, gathering Emma and Hiccup to a table. He picked up a pen and pointed at the two engineers. "We are restarting Project Bifrost."

Emma's eyes widened with both surprise and horror when she heard the word "Bifrost".

"Yep, that is right, Project Bifrost," Gobber repeated after Emma reacted.

"What is Project Bifrost?" Hiccup asked. He felt something was happening between Gobber and Emma.

"Around four and a half decades ago, Muspelheim gathered some of the best engineers we had at that time and started to research and try to create, function, and control Bose-Einstein Condensate. The name of that project was Bifrost," Gobber told the story in a deep tone. "Hogan Don VischKwades was the Lead Engineer of that project."

"He was my grandpa," Emma said, looking down at the table.

"Ok, that's interesting," Hiccup commented. "They didn't make it, right?"

"Of course, otherwise we don't need this talk anymore. At that time, we didn't have the technology to cool dilute gas down to near absolute zero. But that didn't stop the research team," Gobber continued with the story. "Those people were a group of crazy geniuses, especially Hogan: they found a way to decrease the speed of molecules. I'm not sure what way the used, and I think nobody knows what way they used except for the research team, but it worked. The process was slow and very complicated, but that was not the main problem that the research team faced. They had a competitor."

"Competitor?" Hiccup asked. "Another lab was doing the same thing as well?"

"Yes. Another private laboratory, their lead engineer was Davis Alchensentrik. Hogan and his team lowered the temperature to thirty Kelvins. Man, it was a miracle at that time, thirty Kelvins, forty-five years ago," Gobber nodded his head gently with awe. "And Davis's team reached fifty Kelvins, not bad either. But Davis and his team were competitive, they didn't want to see others being successful. So, they murdered Hogan Don VischKwades."

"What?" Hiccup wasn't ready for a dramatic change of the story.

"Yep, and that's why Sam finally decided to have that Security Division. So, after Hogan's death, the rest of the team didn't live long as well. They all died for different reasons: I know that the First Assistant Engineer got into a car accident and died before the ambulance could reach the hospital, and Sam told me that when the team was in their lab, trying their best to finish the project, hydrogen tank got accidentally ignited, and blew up the whole lab. You can see that these 'accidents' were all planned, right?"

"Yes, I can see that. But why did Davis try to kill them? Just because they were their competitor?" Hiccup asked.

"I don't know, but that is the only possibility we could find."

"And now you know why I'm here, right?" Emma turned to Hiccup. "You need my help with this thing."

"And how do you prove it?" Hiccup shrugged. "You are the granddaughter of the previous Lead Engineer of this project, good for you, but that doesn't mean you know more about this than others."

"You don't know that," Emma said slowly, looking into Hiccup's eyes.

"Then let me know."

* * *

Meanwhile, in Zurich, Switzerland.

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, one of the best universities in Europe, masters almost every topic related to science and technology. Wilhelm Rontgen, Albert Einstein, Wernher Von Braun, and countless famous scientists received their degrees from this school.

More than a hundred students filled an auditorium with their notebooks and laptops in front of them. On the stage, their physics professor used a slideshow to teach his class. The professors clean, white shirt was a tugged into his khaki trousers. His heard had already turned white and some wrinkles crept up his face. Silver hair mixed up with his dark brown hair. Even though he was no longer that young and dreamy professor, his energetic and joyful style had always been entertaining to his students.

"As we all know, the faster molecules move, the more energy a substance has, but it produces more heat," the professor said as he presented a graph. "That means, warmer means more energy, and cooler means less energy. Hot substances can heat up its surrounding substances easily, but cold substance can't."

The students listened, and the sound of notes writing dominated the room when the professor paused for a breath.

As the professor continued with his lecture, a man with short, blond hair quietly walked into the auditorium. A pair of sunglasses covered his face. He stood at the back aisle, against the wall, watching silently at the aged man on the stage.

"Professor Alchensentrik, how do we control the movement of molecules?" A student asked.

"Well, that's quite hard," Professor Alchensentrik replied. "We can cool down the molecules by using laser and other technologies, and these are all listed in your textbook…Um, if you mean how to make the molecules do what we want to do, at least I don't think that's possible…"

As the professor looked up at his students, he spotted the man standing in the back. He narrowed his eyes trying to get a better vision.

"Well, consider it's almost time, so I'll release you guys early today, a lot of information to review," Professor Alchensentrik turned his laptop off. "Test will be on Friday. Good luck and have a nice day."

The sound of backpack zipping filled the room. More than one hundred students paced toward the exit with their friends and complained about their upcoming test. They totally ignored the man.

Professor Alchensentrik also packed up his book and laptop on the podium and put them in his bag, not looking at the man.

"You don't remember me?" the man said. His voice echoed in the empty space.

"The class is over. You can visit me in my office," the professor replied.

The man walked down the middle aisle until he reached the stage, hands in his pockets. "C' mon, Davis, we used to be friends."

The professor slammed his books on the podium, still not looking at the man. "You can't just show up like this, Axl," he growled. "This will get me into trouble."

"What harm can I do?" the man, or Axl shrugged, leaning on the stage. "I just want to meet with an old friend."

"Are you sure no one was following you?" Professor Alchensentrik, or Davis pointed at Axl.

"In this world, less than a dozen people have the ability to follow me, and I don't think anyone has the ability to follow me without letting me know."

"You are a monster, Axl. I'm pretty sure the people you killed can fill an entire football stadium. Anyway, what are you doing here in Zurich?"

"I already told you. Not every scientist can get the name Davis the Alchemist."

"I'm just a university professor right now."

"But how about your private laboratory. You spend every night there. If you are just a professor, then why you are still doing it?" Axl asked, even though he already knew the answer.

"Because forty-five years ago I failed," Davis sighed, running his hands through his hair. "Fucking Muspelheim. Bunch of sissies. How is Heimdall?"

"As always, being chased by every intelligence agency, but we got out every time."

"No troubles?"

"If there were problems, Eric knows what to do."

"Anyway, you are not here to just trash talk with me," Davis added. "Tell me why you are here."

"Well, if you insist" Axl scratched his head. "We got info about Muspelheim is restarting Project Bifrost."

"I thought you already killed every engineer associated with that project."

"Yes, we did, but a god damned customer ordered it from Muspelheim."

"Customer?"

"Another old friend," Axl smiled. "DPA."

"DPA? Those assholes? Fuck them," Davis slammed his fist on his podium.

"I wish," Axl chuckled. "They are our deadliest…companion."

"Companion? Team Echo almost wiped out the entire Heimdall: three casualties, at least no death, and now you are joking to me?" Davis growled. "I still care about you muttonheads."

"I know."

"So, you said that Muspelheim is restarting Project Bifrost?" Davis asked. "I need you to do me a favor."

"What?"

"Do the same thing you did forty-five years ago."

* * *

Valka stared at the world map on her desk, her bayonet dangled on her belt. More than a dozen red pins scattered across the map. Her right index finger ran from pin to pin, and her eyes trailed from country to country.

"You guys showed up in Brazil, then went to Texas," she murmured. "Where are you guys now…"

"Valka, we got movement," Astrid rushed into the room with a laptop in hand.

"What, about Heimdall?" Valka looked up at Astrid, eyes lightened with excitement.

"Yes," Astrid nodded her head. "A few hours ago, security cameras of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich captured Axl McDowell walking into their physics class."

"Switzerland?" Valka opened her drawer and took out another red pin. After finding Zurich, Switzerland on her map, she placed the pin on the map. "Was he alone?"

"Seems like it. Security cameras only captured him," Astrid handed the laptop to Valka.

"Mmmm…why would he go there?" Valka.

"Valka, Heimdall showed up in Charleston," Heather yelled as she ran into the room.

"Charleston, South Carolina?" Astrid asked.

"Yeah, why?"

"Nothing."

"Ok, we are not far from Charleston," Valka said as she placed another red pin on the map. "Tell everyone, we go there, and try to at least gather some info."

"Ok," Heather replied and walked out the room.

"Astrid, I have another job for you," Valka laid her right hand on Astrid's shoulder.

"What?" Astrid asked. "I want to go with you guys."

"No, you are going back to Muspelheim."

"The company we went to buy some stupid stuff?"

"Yep, and I want you to… reunite with your boy," Valka whispered, smiling.

Astrid's face flushed. "How…how do you know?"

"Well, when we went to Muspelheim, you were…infatuated by that young engineer, we all saw it. You always yell his name during sleep, gods know what you were dreaming," Valka smirked, winked her right eye. "And finally, to prove my suspicions, you were drunk once, and we…extracted the info out of you."

Astrid froze in Valka's room for more than ten seconds. Valka laughed at the dumbfounded girl. "So, your mission is to rebuild your relationship, otherwise you don't come back, ok? We'll take care of Heimdall. No problem."

* * *

**To be continued **

**Thank you guys for reading my story, and I really appreciate that.**

**From now on the updates will be slower, and I'm sorry about that. Right now I'm in another country, visiting my family.**


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6:

"What's that on your necklace?" Hiccup pointed at Emma's chest, a piece of clear, glass-like material dangled on her metal necklace.

"This?" Emma unhooked her necklace and put it in her right palm. "Just a piece of glass, quite sharp. My grandpa gave it to my mom when she was a little girl, and my mom gave it to me when I was a little girl."

"Hogan Don VischKwades?" Hiccup looked at the glass, eyelash trembled imperceptibly. "Can I take a closer look at it?"

"Sure, it's not something special. Just a little bit stained."

After receiving the necklace from Emma, he put it under the light on his table. He tilted the glass, trying to get a better view. The glass didn't reflect light.

"What?" Seeing Hiccup's attention so absorbed by her necklace,

"This… is not a piece of some stained glass," Hiccup murmured slowly. He ran his thumb across the smooth surface of the material in his hand. The stains on the glass surface could be observed by eye, but Hiccup couldn't feel them with his finger. "Did Hogan say anything about this… glass?"

"I don't know. He gave it to my mom first. My mom didn't tell me a thing, just told me this is a piece of glass from my grandpa," Emma moved closer to Hiccup. "You found something, Mr. Genius?"

"Too dense," Hiccup stood up, walked to his microscope, and placed the glass under the lens. "Shit, I need the CPM."

"What's that?"

"Computer Powered Microscope. Something like a mix of a microscope and a computer," Hiccup rushed to his drawer like an insane monkey who found a banana tree. From the drawer, he took out a microscope with wires and a displayer. "Fishlegs and I created this. Well, not really created, we just found a way to connect a magnifying scope and a computer together and made a few tweaks. This baby can magnify 5000 times and identify the ingredients. Just a little bit inaccurate."

"O..ok," Emma followed Hiccup to his table.

"Usually, glass is 75% silicon dioxide and some other stuffs like calcium oxide, you know that, right?" Hiccup asked while plugging the wires together. "And glass is amorphous, and it should be able to reflect and refract light."

"Yes, I know that," while listening, Emma removed her green headband and ran her fingers through her hair.

"This one doesn't reflect light," Hiccup flicked the glass.

After Hiccup placed the scope above the glass and adjusted the focus, the displayer lightened up, and little dots showed up on the screen. Little dots showed up on the screen, and the computer automatically labeled them as "unknown molecule". The dots moved together like a wall or phalanx. Air molecules tried to penetrate through this "wall", but the "unknown molecules" pushed them back. Hiccup's eyelashes shook as this took place before his eyes.

"Those are the molecules. Very compact, but also very organized and… active," Hiccup pointed at the dots on the screen. "I have never seen molecules that organized before. They look like one giant molecule instead of millions of tiny ones."

"So, what does that mean?" Emma sat on the other side of the table, resting her arms on the table, looking straight at Hiccup.

"That means this piece of… something is not glass," Hiccup turned "Are you sure Hogan told you this is glass?"

"My mom told me this is glass, and she told me that her dad, my grandpa, told her," Emma shrugged. "I'm not sure if there was any misunderstanding."

"Anyway, this is not our main focus of this project," Hiccup sighed and withdrew the clear material from under the lens and handed back to Emma. "Hold on to your glass, and maybe we can go deep into that after this project."

"You know, you are pretty attractive when you are focusing on something," Emma walked around the table and laid her hand on his shoulder. Hiccup and whispered with a smirk.

"That's off-topic," not even looking at the girl, Hiccup stood up, unplugged his displayer and magnifying scope, and threw them into a drawer.

* * *

"Brandt, you remember when two engineers stoled your gears? I was on the second floor laughing at you," a guard smiled as his memory came back to him.

"Shut up, Alex," Brandt hit his friend in the stomach with his P90. "It was all your fault that we are here in the wild."

Brandt and Alex, two security guards of Muspelheim, were assigned to patrol the Road that linked Asgard with the outside world. This paved road was the only way getting to Asgard. The only other choice was to go through the uncharted, miserable, and dangerous forest of the Appalachian Mountains. Even though "patrolling the Road/" sounds simple, usually this work was a punishment for guards who violated a rule or multiple rules, the Road extended for more than two miles, surrounded by the trees of Appalachian Mountains, completely isolated from the world. The dense tree branches and leaves totally blocked the sky, only a few light beams could reach the ground. People who walked on this Road would feel like they were on another planet, disconnected from society.

"Who told you to leave the arsenal's key at the main entrance?" Brandt bellowed.

"An engineer," Alex replied. "She told me that she had orders from Helga."

"You idiot, that was a trick! I know you are new here, but you know that they do this all the time, right? Just ignore them or throw a few punches."

"I know, but if that was really Helga's order, we won't just be patrolling the road right now. She'll beat us up. You should know that, right? You've been a guard here for more than five years," Alex reminded his friend.

"That's kind of true," Brandt adjusted the sling of his weapon, trying to find a more comfortable position.

Even though the duo trash talked as they patrolled the Road, their eyes still searched through the trees and bushes, trying to find potential threats.

"But… fuck this," Alex complained. "Now I know why all the guards told me to get away from patrolling the Road."

"Why?"

"Too lonely. What can you encounter in the wild? Just miles and miles of fucking forest," Alex yelled. "I want to be a lumberjack."

"Now you are regretting your choice?" Brandt laughed, punched his friend on the elbow. "Get used to this. You'll be doing this very often. Helga has an iron fist, or she rules her division with an iron fist, literally an iron fist."

"So, is she very strict?"

"No, not strict," Brandt whispered by Alex's ear as if Helga was listening. "Tyranny, you know."

"How?"

"Because you are new here, so she gave you the lightest punishment of leaving the key outside," Brandt patted his friend. "Another unlucky boy called Roos, a six-feet-one, over-muscular man, and Helga literally beat the shit out of him because he refused to follow her order."

"No way! That's a joke. There are similar stories in the place that I came from."

"Well, that's a fact in Muspelheim," Brandt unbuckled the radio on his belt and pressed a button. "Roos, this is Brandt."

"Come in," the radio crackled.

"Tell our new man Alex about how badly Helga beat you up," Brandt said.

"Shut up, don't tell that to Alex," Roos yelled. "That's a scar that I'll never be able to forget. That woman is like Atalanta herself."

"Atalanta? I thought Hippomenes fixed her problem. Weren't you bragging that you are Hippomenes before she beat you up, Mr. Professional boxer?" Brandt laughed. "By the way, Alex is right beside me."

"Fuck you, Brandt."

Then the radio silenced.

"You know, Roos is a former professional boxer, but Helga can still win him easily," Brandt shrugged.

The duo kept walking down the Road, still trash-talking and "Helga cursing". When they reached a turn, a person wearing a black trench coat entered their vision.

"Watching out, incoming," Alex whispered as he loaded his SRM 1216 shotgun.

The person was a female with blond hair and sky blue eyes wearing a pair of black tactical boots. Her footsteps were loud and clear, filled with confidence. Her eyes stared at the front, hands in her pockets. Brandt and Alex looked at each other, both confused. She doesn't look like an invader nor a tourist who wandered into this place. She looked more like an executioner.

"Hey, gal, this is a private property," Brandt warned loudly the female as he chambered his P90. "Now turn around and get out of here."

Astrid didn't stop nor turn around, yet she continued walking toward Asgard, totally ignoring Brandt.

"Did you hear me? I told you to turn the fuck around and get your ass out of here," Brandt yelled as he blocked her path. "Or you will be shot."

"Helga, we got problems here," as Brandt yelled, Alex reported to Helga through his radio.

Astrid sighed like taking care of two naughty children. She took out her badge of DPA and raised it before Brandt's eyes. "Now get out of my way."

"Screw you," Brandt didn't retreat, and his P90 raised up. "That shit doesn't work here."

"I don't want to hurt anyone, so can you two gentlemen step out of my way?" Astrid asked politely.

"I said get your ass out of here!" Brandt's P90 pointed at Astrid's forehead, the red dot of the paper pointer on the P90 landed on Astrid's forhead. Alex, standing behind Brandt, also loaded his SRM 1216.

"Well, if you are putting things this way…" Astrid said.

She suddenly disappeared. Well, not literally disappeared, Brandt and Alex just couldn't capture her movement. After years of training, Astrid could reach a speed of 80km/h and maintain that speed for a few seconds. A few seconds were long enough for her to take care of Brandt and Alex.

Astrid threw a punch on Brandt's chest, causing Brandt to fly into the air and land face down on the paved road. Brandt curled up his body before he landed, trying to reduce the impact, but he still felt like being hit directly by a battle ram, broke at least two of his ribs.

Alex aimed his target and squeezed the trigger of his SRM 1216, but Astrid had already moved aside. The shrapnel flew into the forest and pierced through a tree branch. Birds flew scarred into the air. He took a step back, prepared to fire again.

But the shotgun slipped away from his hand. Astrid grabbed the barrel and seized the gun. She held the gun like a baseball bat, and hit Alex on the head, knocking him out.

Brandt and Alex were both former military, might receive some of the most elite training, but they still couldn't face a DPA agent.

"Hey, hey, hey! We are not here for hitting and punching!" a girl showed up behind a tree trunk. She ran to the two guards on the ground, checking their vital signs.

"Heather? I thought you are with the team," Astrid didn't expect companions. She remembered Valka and Team Foxtrot were on their way hunting for Heimdall.

"That was Valka's original plan, but she wanted someone to make sure you don't just go straight in and kill everyone, like what you have just done, so she sent me to keep an eye on you," Heather stood up, pointed at Astrid.

Heather wore a blue Yankee's baseball hat backwards and also a trench coat, but she put on a pair of slippers instead of boots.

"Why are you wearing slippers?" Astrid pointed at Heather's exposed toes. "Those are not good for hiking in the woods."

"Because when Valka assigned me this job, I was sleeping, so I didn't get the chance to fully change," Heather replied. "Anyway, I got the name from Valka. It's 'Hiccup', right? Your boy's name is Hiccup? How do you know that this so-called Hiccup will just go with you?"

"Oh, that's not a problem," Astrid laughed. "If he does not want to come with me, I'll just beat him up and throw him into a van, and drive to someplace and pretend to fuck him. I remember he would give in to anything if I use my secret trick."

"So what if he says 'yes'? " Heather asked.

"Very simple," Astrid snapped her fingers. "I'll just… you should know the answer."

"Now I know why you were shouting 'Hiccup!' in midnights," Heather smirked. "Yeah, of course, I know the answer to a so-called spitfire."

"Hey, that's not true!"

"Oh, that's not true? You got yourself another boyfriend named Hiccup?" Heather's eyes widened. "Wow, Astrid! Look at that progress!"

"That's also not true. I'm a faithful adult."

"Sure, 'faithful' is not very accurate, and you are barely an adult," Heather crossed her arms.

"Ok, enough jokes, so what do we do now?"

"I don't know. You screwed up before you even step into Asgard," Heather complained as she dragged the unconscious Alex away from the Road and hid him behind a tree.

Brandt, on the other hand, reached his shivering hand for the radio on his belt. Astrid's assault broke his ribs but didn't knock him out.

"The Road… invaders…" as he spoke, blood dripped down his mouth. His broken ribs pierced into his lungs, causing blood to burst out from his inner organs.

"Shut up," before Brandt could finish his sentence, Astrid's right instep kicked the radio away. It rolled down the Road and landed among the trees.

"Make your way back to Asgard and report this," Astrid said to Brandt as her right foot landed heavily on his knees, perhaps breaking them as well.

"Astrid! This is your last warning!" Heather tried to stop Astrid, but it didn't work.

* * *

Just one mile away, in Sam's office, Hiccup and Emma stood before the president of Muspelheim.

"I'm sorry, Hiccup, for assigning Fishlegs to England, but we don't have a choice," Sam said to Hiccup.

"Understandable," Hiccup replied, even though he was silently yelling 'go and fuck yourself'.

"Let's talk about your project," Sam leaned forward. "I'm not worried about your abilities, techniques, and knowledge of engineering. I just have a few things to remind you."

"First," Sam said. "Your research is very advanced, and not a lot of people had done that before, and Hogan Don VischKwades' team was one of them. They left their documents and manuscripts for incoming engineers who try to continue their research. Those things are locked up in a safe. I know those manuscripts are very valuable for you, but you can't use them."

"Why is that?" Emma asked. "If we have them, we don't need to start from scratch."

"Don't ask me why. Just remember that you can not use their documents and manuscripts."

"Ok, what's the next thing to remind us?"

"That's it, off you go. Good luck," Sam waved his hand.

"Uhh, I don't get it," as the duo traveled toward their lab, Emma scratched her scalp.

"Well, I guess we are on our own…" Hiccup replied carelessly. Then he paused.

Two girls wearing trench coats stood at the end of the corridor, about twenty feet in front of them, a blonde and a brunette. Trench coats were excellent tools for hiding weapons. According to the training that Asgard's guards received, Hiccup believed that those strangers should be taken out when they stepped into this building.

But the only problem was that the blonde looked familiar to Hiccup.

"As…Astrid?" Hiccup said huskily.

"That's me," Astrid replied. Her voice was low but projected clearly across the long corridor and into Hiccup's ears.

Hiccup had already realized that Astrid showed up again in his life, but listening to her sweet voice still shivered Hiccup's body. His face remained expressionless, but a drop of tear rolled down his cheek.

Emma looked at Hiccup, confused. She didn't know much about Hiccup's life, so she didn't understand Hiccup's emotion right now. If Fishlegs was watching, he would probably take out a video camera and record down this reunion.

"Come here, I know you better than anyone," Astrid said. She didn't cry nor scream like most people would do when they met with their long lost lover. Astrid just stood there.

As Hiccup advanced toward Astrid, he could see the nine-year-old Astrid standing in front of him, just like how they spent their childhood at the beach of Charleston. He had been waiting for this moment since he was nine. Almost every night he dreamed about pulling Astrid in for a hug and never let go.

Astrid stepped forward, surrounded Hiccup's neck with her arms and hugged him tightly. Before she came here, Astrid thought she could remain calm for at least a minute, but she soon realized that after seeing how much Hiccup had changed, "remain calm" was impossible.

Hiccup pulled Astrid into him, just like what he had been waiting for years. He could smell the familiar fragrant from Astrid's hair, the scent that would never fade away. He put some force to his arms, like straining Astrid with two chains, but she didn't object. When they were nine, they had the same height, but over the years, Hiccup grew at least four more inches than Astrid, so her head could barely reach his nose.

"I thought…I thought we would never meet each other again," Hiccup whispered as he sobbed. His tears wetted her trench coat.

"I'm sorry, my dear, I really am," Astrid ran her fingers through his hair, massaging her scalp. Even though she hadn't been using this skill for more than nine years, the technique that would calm Hiccup down came back to her instantly.

Under Astrid's gentle touch, the tense Hiccup slowly calmed down. His breath slowed, no longer weeping, yet he didn't let the girl go. Astrid put her left palm on Hiccup's chest, through his lab coat, she could feel his strong and dense heartbeat. Hiccup withdrew his arms from Astrid and trailed his finger along the edge of Astrid's cheek. Astrid stared at Hiccup, her eyes filled with warmth and careness. She held onto Hiccup's neck and pressed her lips on his forcefully and almost violently.

Heather had been a friend of Astrid for more than five years. They had shared secrets, fought shoulder-to-shoulder, shared the bed with each other, and saved each other's life for multiple times, so Heather believed that she knew everything about Astrid. In those five years, Astrid's eyes had been shooting daggers at almost everyone and she had always been a cold-blood killer and spitfire who was awed by everyone. But in this corridor of Asgard, Astrid first time revealed her coy and tender side. Now, witnessing how Astrid almost melted in front of Hiccup, Heather finally realized that she still didn't know Astrid well enough.

The affinity in the corridor started to attract engineers and guards. They stopped what they were doing and watched. Some of the older generations smiled and whispered to one another as if they recalled the time when they kissed their lover in front of a crowd.

"Let's get out of here and we'll talk, okay?" Astrid whispered as she realized that people started to congregate. Her eyes searched through the crowd, not reacting to the merriment atmosphere around her.

Heather notified that the way Astrid looked at the crowd differed from the way she looked at Hiccup. In front of Hiccup, she acted like a teenage girl who first met with her crush. But when other people showed up, she remained vigilant like a tiger patrolling her territory.

"I need to ask Gobber…I mean the Main Engineer for approval of absence," Hiccup replied, still hugging Astrid.

"You are excused, sir, because you are way too easy to be distracted by your girl, and if I use my authority to force you to go back to work, I believe you'll be thinking about how to lay her instead of engineering," Gobber jumped out from Thor-knows-where and cried. " Get out of here, you knuckleheads who dares to PDA in front of every best engineer in this world."

Astrid gripped Hiccup's right wrist and ran through the crowd and towards the door. Hiccup limped behind her, trying to break himself free, but her hand held on firmly like a handcuff, even disturbing his blood circulation. Hiccup had no choice. Even though his mental power and knowledge might be the top on this planet, he didn't seriously develop his physical strength.

"One dares to come and one dares to follow!" Gobber cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, followed by his loud laughter. The crowd teased the escaping duo, especially the guards. They whistle and one of them even shouted: "Don't over-exercise yourself, Hiccup!"

After entertaining the crowd and himself, Gobber calmed down and straightened his shirt. Then he unbuckled the radio on his belt and raised it before his mouth. "Helga, anyone patrolling the Road today?"

"Yeah, Brandt and Alex," after some short interferences, Helga answered. "Why?"

"Send two men to bring them back. The two girls probably knocked them out."

"How do you know that?"

"Astrid…well, you don't know their names anyway… the blond girl doesn't look like a lenient and motherly one. Her warrior sole is very conspicuous," Gobber said, staring down the corridor. "Your guards' mission is to stop any unidentified personal, so that's a conflict with her characteristic."

"Maybe, but you haven't answer my question: how do you know that? You are not from the military or anything related to that, and that means you don't have the experience to interpret it, Gobber," Helga sneered.

"You should've met her. One hundred percent pure spitfire. Anyone can feel it."

A few feet away from Gobber, Heather walked next to Emma, who stared blankly at the direction which Hiccup and Astrid left.

"Hey, you are his…helper, I suppose?" Heather asked, also looking in the same direction.

"Yeah, Assistant Engineer Emma VischKwades, recently serving Lead Engineer Hiccup Haddock," Emma replied.

"Serving?"

"Or assisting, doesn't matter which word you use. We prefer the word 'serving'."

"I see…" Heather paused. "You two didn't…"

"Oh, no, no, no," Emma laughed at the question. "I just came here a few days ago."

"Good for you, because if you two fucked, doesn't matter who wanted it first, Astrid is going to skin you herself," Heather said emotionlessly, her arms crossed on chest.

Emma glared at the brunette aside her, perplexed by Heather's apathetic admonition. Emma saw the "DPA" badge on Heather's coat, but she didn't know what was it.

"Good luck," Heather snapped her fingers as she walked towards the exit. "And do me a favor, don't get in the way of their relationship, for your own sake."

* * *

**To be continued**

**This chapter got way out of hand. I didn't picture writing near 4,000 words when I began. You guys enjoyed reading a long chapter? **

**CajunBear73 - Just want you to know that I really appreciate you supporting my story. Astrid is going to have a big challenge in the future, and you'll just going to wait and see what Axl and his team are planing. **

**Actually, I appreciate everyone who reads my story, no matter you like it or not. ^_^**

**This story is going to get pretty long, and I don't really know how long it'll take me to finish it. **

**Updates will still be slower than usual, sorry about that. **


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7:

Plymouth, England

Tens and hundreds of ships berthed along the coast of Plymouth. This harbor used to be a military base for the Royal Navy during the First and Second World War. The English Channel provided easy transportation for this city. A five-story building was located just a few hundred yards away from the harbor, overlooking the channel like a sentinel. The building had absolutely no decoration on its outside wall, just a plain gray building that people usually viewed as a mediocre storehouse. A small grass field furnished by evergreens and dense bushes surrounded the building, providing a barrier for it.

But inside the walls, nine Assistant Engineers and one Lead Engineer from Muspelheim and mountains of scientific equipment and computers filled the space. These science nerds had no interest for the beach or the Atlantic Ocean because they were too busy "making love" with their nuclear reactor, laser coolers, and particle accelerators.

"Bryan, this is my last warning, make sure you use the hydrogen flamethrower with extreme cautious, you muttonhead. Playing with a flamethrower which has a range of thirty meters beside a redesigned nuclear reactor is not cautious. If you ignite that thing, the whole building will all go kaboom like a firework. Heavy nuclear waste will be spread across Plymouth, creating another Chernobyl. I don't want any of those to happen because of your egregious incompetence," Fishlegs bellowed as a twenty-year-old engineer fooled around with a hydrogen tank connected with something like an M2 flamethrower.

"Don't worry about this building, sir. We have enough cadmium rods to sink a ship," Bryan replied while throwing flames into the air.

"Ok, but the air circulation of this building is not very good, and if you keep doing that, the hot air is going to damage some precision instruments," Fishlegs yelled as he removed a microscope away from his table to avoid the flame.

After a careful decision made by Gobber and Samuel Timothy, Muspelheim sent a squad of engineers led by Fishlegs to Plymouth, England to set up Muspelheim's first overseas laboratory. They chose Plymouth because they needed to use the ocean as a cooling device. So, Fishlegs and his nine engineers were setting up a private nuclear factory.

Meanwhile, behind the bushes which surrounded the lab, four ghost-oid people dressed in black combat suits hid in shadows. Muspelheim planted these bushes to create a biological boundary between the lab and society, but they provided an excellent hideout for invaders.

"David, are you sure that Fishlegs Ingerman is in there?" Axl, leader of the famous mercenary group: "Heimdall", pointed at the rectangular, gray building before them.

"Yes, he is the Lead Engineer of this nuclear center. He was an Assistant Engineer two weeks ago," the vanguard of Heimdall, David Mulks, a former lieutenant of 10th Mountain Division, replied. Weighed more than 250 pounds, David's friends called him the "moving tank". During missions, David usually struck first, clearing a path for his team. Not because Axl assigned him this job, but because David enjoyed, or even obsessed, rushing an entire defense himself and beating the crap out of everyone. The military thought he had some mental problems and kicked him out. His hair was cut to near bold, but not because of his will: when Heimdall assaulted a garrison in the Middle East a few years ago, napalm exploded a few yards above him, nearly burnt out his entire head. He had two holsters attached to his waist, which contained two redesigned Glock 18 in total.

Other members of Heimdall, Nina Rowland, and Evan Paris hid behind the tree trunk of a poplar, few yards behind David and their leader. Nina was the second-in-command of Heimdall, an Aphrodite-style girl who would attract everyone's attention in public with her pale eyes. She braided her dark red hair into a single ponytail which extended down to her waist. Unlike her goddess overview, she dressed in a latex combat suit with gloves and tactical belt, which changed her into someone like Black Widow. She held an HK416 in hand, extra magazines and a P228 pistol attached to her belt. Contradicting to her appearance, Nina ranked second on "Interpol's List of the 10 Most Wanted Humans on Earth", right beneath her leader, Axl, who took the first place. According to some unverified rumors that spread among other mercenaries and intelligence agencies, Nina fucked more men, and also women, than the casualties on Gold Beach during D-Day. And that also included her three other team members.

Evan Paris, unlike his three blood-thirsty teammates, didn't carry a rifle or pistol. Two black, steel cases rested beside his feet. This five-feet-two little man graduated from MIT and worked in Lincoln Laboratory for three years, received some of the best engineering education in this world. His friends gave him the nickname "Hephaestus," who is the god of the forge and fire.

"Evan, I know you are good at engineering, but this mission needs someone that can fight," Axl commented. "I don't know why you are here. You can sit in the van and do your computer thing."

"Which one of you knows how to control their nuclear reactor? You guys only know how to fight, but you need me to deal with their reactor in case you empty a mag at it," Evan snorted. "Bunch of simple-minded fight dummies."

"Wait, if they are working next to a nuclear reactor, won't the radiation kill them?"

"No, Muspelheim has its way of dealing with radiation, which is a classified file in their central database. I can't bypass their firewall to get that information. But I do know that a lot of their apparatuses and products are nuclear powered or generated."

Evan supported the idea that people don't always need physical power to win a battle. He believed in computers and robots because he correctly foresaw the unlimited future of technology on battlefields.

"Screw you. I bet that Fishlegs Ingerman is way better than you. I rather have him as my technical specialist," Nina punched him in the belly.

"He knows about engineering, and I respect his expertise in that field, but I also know computer, which he doesn't know shit about. After capturing him, you should use your method to extract information about Hiccup from him," Evan pointed out while covering his vulnerable belly.

"What's my method?"

"Seduce him, like what you did to almost everyone we captured whom we need to extract information from."

"He is a fat ass, if not extremely necessary or Axl doesn't give the order, I won't do it."

"Oh, so you do care who you lay with," David laughed. "We thought you didn't care."

"Well," Nina untied her ponytail and loosened her hair. "I don't mind laying with you three, which I already did, multiple times, and other normal humans."

"Then how about that Hiccup Haddock? I showed you his picture and file," David asked.

"Seems like a good target."

"Ok, enough talking," Axl ordered. "Get ready."

"Uh, they haven't set up their defense system, and that means we won't face any resistance. Unless some of the engineers know how to defend. I don't think we need weapons," David replied, even though he still loaded his two Glock 18.

"I didn't give you real bullets. Those are rubber bullets," Axl took out his M4A1. "I don't want to leave a mess behind."

"So does that mean we can shoot them without worrying about their life?"

"Well, just don't shoot at and above their necks."

A few minutes later, the four members of Heimdall jumped over the bush and started rushing across the grass field. David automatically took the lead. He held one Glock 18 in hand and another one in holster. Even though his pistol held a 34 rounds, extra occupancy mag, David's redesigned Glock 18 could empty it in less than two seconds.

David ran toward the metal door and launched himself at it a few feet away, both his feet landed on the door, detaching it from the frame by his weight and impact force. The door slammed on the floor and knocked over a desk with a computer on top. David flew into the room and descended among some file boxes. Following the breakthrough, Nina stepped into the lab and immediately ducked to her right, avoiding potential attacks.

No one in the lab tried to attack the intruder. Those engineers just turned their heads toward their detached door, intrigued by what on earth was wrong with their hardened steel door. After a quick search of a target, she fired a rubber bullet at the nearest engineer. The bullet bounced off from his belly and dropped onto a table, but it created a palm-size bruise that turned his skin purple. The engineer fell on his back, covering his belly and screamed like someone got their arm cut off.

"Great, there will be a lot of crying babies," Nina said as she emptied a whole mag of rubber bullets at another engineer twenty feet away from her.

Comparing to real metal bullets, rubber bullets have less power, range, and accuracy. Twenty-seven rubber bullets were projected at that engineer, but only two hit the target, and others just created some dents on water pipes and gas tanks.

"Invaders!" Fishlegs was the first engineer to recover from the shock. He ran for a red emergency handle on a wall.

Engineers all started yelling and running aimlessly in the room, just like what people tend to do when terrorists attack a shopping mall. Almost no engineers from Muspelheim received any military training, and that caused the Security Division to overwork themselves all the time. Gobber and Helga tried to convince Samuel Timothy to provide at least the very basic self-defense information to the engineers, but Sam decided to reject their advice because he believed that the engineers should use their brain cells at the right place.

Axl and Evan quickly followed Nina into the lab and David stood up, recovered from his "battle ram" style attack, and they also started firing rubber bullets at anyone who wore white lab coats.

"Why is our target going for the alarm when they don't even have a security system yet?" Axl asked as he shoved a running engineer down.

"Uhh… I don't think that's an alarm," David answered as his Glock 18 started roaring after reloading.

"Stop him! That's their alternative security system. That handle connects with Plymouth police department. They use that before they set up their security system," Evan yelled as he took out a cutter and ran for the communication wires in the corner."

"Give me the tranquilizer!" Nina bellowed, trying not to get her sound covered by the gunshots. "Why didn't you tell us earlier?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I think I forgot!" Evan replied sarcastically.

Fishlegs knew that his lab was extremely valuable, considering the giant nuclear reactor in this building. He thought the invaders were after his precious reactor. Any component of his reactor could sell more than ten thousand dollars on black market, and some countries might spend tons of money to gain the technology behind this redesigned nuclear reactor. Before setting up this lab, he tried to persuade Sam to provide a squad of guards from the Security Division, but unfortunately, Timothy rejected his request.

David pulled out a tranquilize needle from his pocket and threw it to Nina, who stood closer to Fishlegs. After receiving the needle, Nina started sprinting across the lab for Fishlegs. If Fishlegs activated the emergency handle, the whole Plymouth police would come after them.

"You guys stop him, and I'll shut down their communication," Evan cried as he prised off the door of a communication terminal cabinet. More than thirty different wires and switches showed up before his eyes.

"Fuck!" Evan whispered as he searched through the wires. But he quickly lost his patience. "When things go complicated, go old school."

He lifted his shirt and unveiled his belt, more than a dozen construction equipment like screwdrivers and wire cutters were attached to it, making him look more like a Home Depot person than a mercenary.

All members of Heimdall equipped a specially designed tactical belt that could hold almost anything from a bayonet sheath to an M60 machine gun. Heimdall nicknames their belts the "loader" due to its capability of attaching objects onto it. Axl, Nina, and David's "loaders" were covered by handguns, extra mags, flashlights, grenades. but Evan's a hammer from his and pounded the cabinet into pieces. The wires zapped and sparks fanned out in the room.

Nina finally reached Fishlegs, who was trying to break the protecting glass of the handle. She quickly pierced the needle into his neck, and the needle automatically injected the drug into Fishlegs' neck vessel. After a few seconds, Fishlegs fell unconsciously on the floor.

"Done," Nina relieved, smoothing her hair that tangled up during the break-in.

* * *

Hiccup walked up to the stairs in front of his house, followed by Astrid who's hand still held on his wrist like a handcuff.

"So this is where you live?" Astrid asked as she looked at the one-story brick house with a small front garden.

"Yeah, for about four years," Hiccup searched through his pocket for his key and unlocked the door with one hand. "Could you… let go?"

Since they encountered each other in the corridor of Asgard, Astrid hasn't let go of Hiccup's wrist. So as the duo walked out of the building, pretty much everyone stopped and whistled at their best engineer.

"Is there a problem?"

"Well, not really, but it looks very weird to hold someone's wrist instead of...hand," Hiccup scratched his scalp.

"I don't think this looks weird," Astrid said as she gently pulled Hiccup to her.

"Here is the thing, Astrid," Hiccup stopped before entering his house, turning toward Astrid. "I did miss you, every day, but...I don't think I can adjust to this… rapid change in my life."

"What do you mean?" Astrid could see from Hiccup's eyes that this wasn't a time for jokes. "I'm glad to meet my childhood lover again. I didn't know you are this close to me the whole time."

"Before you… disappeared, I didn't know what to do without you, but after these years, I'm kind of used to live by myself… I mean, I still love you and you still have a huge place in my memory," Hiccup said quickly.

"So you mean you don't want to see me even though you still love me?"

"I don't know. On one side, I do want you to come back to me and we can continue what we did when we were young, but I've been living alone for a long while."

"How long?" Astrid asked, looking him in the eye.

"Around six years."

"Where is your father Stoick? We are the same age, so you just turned eighteen, and that means you started living alone since… twelve?"

"Yeah, and that's why I'm already used to living alone."

Astrid sighed. She let go of Hiccups wrist and pulled him in for a hug. Hiccup didn't react, just letting Astrid's arms surround him. Through the opened door of Hiccup's house, Astrid could only see a small part of the house, but she could already feel the loneliness from the lifeless house.

"We'll talk about this later," Astrid said. "Right now I only have one question: do you want us to be together again? Just like when we were young?"

"Yeah."

"Are you sure?" Astrid stared at him.

Hiccup looked down at the ground, all thoughts ran through his head like a flood. He wasn't ready telling what happened to Stoick to her, and he didn't know how to get used to another person in his life after a long time, even though that person was someone he loved. Sometimes when a couple lives apart from each other for a long time, they might get this feeling that they don't need each other in their lives anymore, even though they still love each other.

"I'm sure," Hiccup looked up at Astrid again.

"I guess we are back on track again," Astrid smiled as she closed the distance between her and Hiccup.

"Heather, are you keeping an eye on Astrid?" Valka's voice came out from Heather's headphones with the sound of heavy footsteps in background.

"Yeah, I'm a few hundred meters away from Hiccup's house looking at her and Hiccup," Heather held a binocular before her eyes, observing Hiccup's house. She stood behind her blue Sadan like some sort of assassins. On the hood of her car, a computer was connected to a camera.

"What are they doing?" Valka asked.

"What a young couple usually do. I have a pretty good vision here," Heather shrugged, still spying on Hiccup and Astrid through her binocular.

"Well… that's not how I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"Hiccup accepted her pretty quick. If two people separated from each other for too long, the reunion won't be an easy one, usually."

"I guess they are not usual. That girl can hide her past pretty well," Heather replied carelessly. "Any progress there?"

"No, we are currently searching an abandoned storehouse," Valka replied. "But seems like Heimdall aren't even in Charleston."

"Maybe there is an information error, or you just can't find them."

"I connected the local police department, and they said they'll put every resource they have to find Heimdall."

"And you believed their shitty response?" Heather cried. "They don't give a fuck to you, and a few days later, maybe they'll say that other priorities need to be taken care of."

"Well, at least better than nothing."

Around five police cars showed up from far away, advancing toward Heather at full speed. Their sirens produced enough sound waves to attract every pedestrian's attention.

"What's going on? I can hear sirens," Valka asked.

"I don't know, at least they are not coming after me," Through her binocular, Heather could see the "Sheriff" sign on the leading car, and followed by it were a black truck with four white letters. "Damn, SWAT is out as well. I guess someone is in big trouble."

Heather thought that the motorcade would go pass her and disappear, but they stopped in front of her.

"What the fuck," Heather murmured. The leading car stopped so close to her that she could see the face of the driver without a binocular.

All doors were pushed open from inside, cops jumped out from their cars as if a bomb was about to go off. SWAT officers rushed out from their truck, wearing their standard black combat suit. Heather didn't expect any of these. She tried to pull out her P229 pistol from her pocket, but then she realized that all guns were pointing at her.

"Ma'am, put your gun down or you will be shot," a six-feet-two cop yelled as he withdrew his pistol. "Remove your pistol and get yourself on the ground."

* * *

**To be continued**

**I'm not a military expert, and that means some parts of the story might sound weird to my fellow readers who are military experts.**

**I'm not in a relationship, and that means I don't really know what it is to be in a relationship, and that means some part of the story might sound weird to my fellow readers who knows about these things.**

**Guys, what do you think Heather is getting herself into and why the police wants her? **

**Please leave a review below and tell us your idea. **

**Thank you for reading. **


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8:

"We got that fat ass, right now we are coming back to Asheville," Axl said to a satellite phone.

On this Gulfstream G600 aircraft, his team members were resting on those oversized couches with enough pillows to bury them alive. They tried to regain their strength and get ready for other works after this long flight. Fishlegs, on the other hand, were blindfolded and sitting unconsciously in the corner, without a couch or a chair. This aircraft was sponsored by the partner of Heimdall, billionaire Eric Frederic.

From the outside, Eric Frederic was a famous politician and a philanthropist who dedicated his time and richness into improving education resources for children who couldn't afford them. He also controlled a lot of political power, which allowed him to visit the Capitol Building or even the White House. His wealth could afford to build ten space stations or set up a camp on the Moon if he wanted to.

But behind all of this, he was the partner of Heimdall and a close friend of Axl McDowell. He provided financial and political support for Heimdall and keeping them away from trouble. Sometimes when some intelligence agencies found some information that could cause lethally affects to Heimdall, he would usually try to erase that trace from the system, usually by hiring people to assassinate the agent who found the info.

"Heather is secured as well. SWAT team got her," Eric added. "I picked her up and brought to our safe house."

"Thanks. How about Charleston? Keeping them busy?"

"Yeah, I hired some people who look like you guys and let them wander around in Charleston, and I told the police department to not help them. The sheriff told me that DPA tried to seek some help from them. It'll take Valka sometime to figure out the truth," The voice of people talking and champagne flutes knocking came from the background.

"Where are you? Another politician's party?" Axl asked.

"Yeah, people wearing tuxedos coming in and out, trying to hide their dirty secrets beneath their wealth," Eric complained. Then, he whispered. "I want to be back in the field again. This 'rich people thing' is driving me crazy."

"I know, and you'll get your chance. You joined the team when we ambushed Team Echo, right?"

"That's like...once in a year."

"Ok, ok, we can argue about this forever," Axl sighed. "We visited your daughter. She is doing just fine in Cambridge."

"How is she? Her life is not affected by my identity, right? She wants to live like a normal person until she graduates."

"Yeah, seems like no one knows Alinda Frederic is the daughter of the famous politician Eric Frederic. She is like usual, friendly, but always alarmed," Axl laughed. "I'm pretty sure she introduced us to her new… boyfriend."

"Boyfriend?" Eric chuckled. "I'm not a good father. I think the last time I met her was two years ago. And now you are telling me she has a boyfriend?"

"We predicted he is her boyfriend due to their intimacy. They wouldn't do such a thing if they are just friends."

"You know, I just realized that you four visited her more times than me, who is her dad. Does that mean I can leave her to you?" Eric joked.

"We'll turn her into someone like Nina if you leave her to us, which I think you don't want that to happen," Axl stared at the passing clouds outside of the G600's window.

"I gotta go, those motherfuckers want me to give a short speech," Eric said quickly as people in the background started shouting his name. "Take care, bud, god be with you."

Axl sighed again as he laid the phone on a table. He knew that even though Eric didn't need to deal with life and death every second like him, but living without secrecy would drive Axl crazy. Axl believed that the press was the deadliest weapon ever created by mankind, and he didn't understand how Eric survived the bombardments from the press every day.

As the Gulfstream G600 descended through the clouds, the Appalachian Mountains stretched endlessly long across the earth. Skyscrapers from cities looked like ants compared to the mountains, and cities scattered around like ancient tribes' residences. From his perspective, nothing could block Axl's vision, so he could even see South Carolina. The city below the aircraft was Asheville, North Carolina. The plane circled above the city two times after heading to a private airport outside the city.

"Good old Asheville," a female said behind Axl.

"Yep, nothing changed much," Axl didn't even need to turn to recognize the speaker. "You were pretty… close to Evan when you rested."

"I didn't realize that," Nina walked toward the other side window. "How close?"

"Close enough for me to lay you," Evan stood up from his couch and stretched.

"You had your chances, multiple times," Nina snorted, but then she changed to a more friendly tone. "I don't mind laying with you three."

"Enough, Nina, we don't need any more advertisements here," Axl cried. "You never get tired?"

"She never get tired of romping," David laughed. "Who gave us this plane again?"

"Eric, this plane is his, and the pilots are his staff," Axl replied. "When we land, our next job is to extract information from Fishlegs and Heather."

"Sounds easy."

* * *

Next morning.

Hiccup woke up as the sun lightened his room. He yawned and stretched his legs and arms under his blanket while trying to get rid of his sleepiness. He froze as his fingertips touched another warm body next to him, a soft and tender one. Hiccup jumped up, his sleepiness disappeared abruptly. He lifted his blanket violently as if he found a bomb beneath it. But there was no threat, a naked, blond, sleeping girl was unveiled. She slept soundly and her chest rose and fell as she breathed, hands reached out to where Hiccup had slept.

"You gotta be kidding me," Hiccup murmured as he wiped his face with his hands.

After living alone for a few years, he was already used to waking up by himself, eating dinner by himself, and watching movies by himself. Because he had no one to talk to at home, Hiccup would always turn on the tv, so that his home wouldn't be silent as the dead the whole time. His friends, like Fishlegs and Gobber, sometimes came to his house to hang, but that didn't solve Hiccup's problem.

He sat on his bed for a minute, trying to make himself realize that he should start to face the fact. Then he quietly dressed and exited his bedroom. He grabbed some chocolates from a jar to fill his empty stomach while his phone rang.

"Hello?" Hiccup picked up the call.

"I'm Emma," a female said. "When are you coming back?"

"I'll be there in half an hour," Hiccup answered as he stuffed a slice of bread into his mouth. "Any updates?"

"I got permission to use the Laser."

"The Laser?" Hiccup stopped chewing.

"Yeah, Sam told me last night that we can use the Laser whenever we need it."

"If I remember correctly," Hiccup searched through his memory. "The Laser is aMuspelheim's highly classified machine. I've never seen it before. Only Gobber and Sam know about it. It's a myth."

"Well, I guess it's no longer a myth."

When Hiccup joined Muspelheim, an engineer told him that Asgard had an underground bunker, and the bunker held some of the classified files and equipment of Muspelheim. To get authorization from Sam or Gobber to enter the bunker was just a dream for Muspelheim engineers. The Laser was a legendary apparatus that was located in the bunker. No one knew what it could do and no one had ever seen it before.

"Why do we need some help?" Hiccup said. "He gave us this thing because we need Otherwise he won't just leak a highly classified technology."

"Well, right now we don't need extra help to cool down gases, that's halfway done. We just need BEC to release enough energy to use as a weapon," Emma responded while tapping her laptop.

"So the Laser can make an element release energy without making the atoms move?"

"That's a good guess."

"But that's not possible. Sam can't create energy out of nothing. That is magic, not science."

"Maybe Sam got a magically powered science or something… all right, take your time. Have some fun with your girlfriend. Don't rush. I can take care of the project for a few days" Emma joked, and hung up.

Hiccup dropped his phone on a table and stood near the window. He could see the curve of Appalachian Mountains and the trees on the top.

"Seems like everyone knows about us now," a lazy voice came from behind.

"If you didn't want attention, then you should've waited outside of Asgard," Hiccup responded without turning back. "Hell, you found Asgard."

"I was there when we purchased the weapon. You don't remember?" Astrid stood right behind Hiccup, so close that she could almost feel his body heat.

"I didn't recognize you. You've changed a lot."

"So did you," she rested her head on his back and surrounded his waist by her arms.

"How was your life?"Hiccup tilted his head.

"I'm not sure if I'm supposed to tell you…"

"I know, you work for the government, right? Like FBI?"

"How do you know?" Astrid looked up.

"We ran a facial identification on you," Hiccup smiled. "I feel pretty safe with someone who can fight."

"Well you already know, then why bother to ask?"

"I wasn't asking about your job. I mean your life."

"Not good. My parents died when I left, and my uncle put me into this junior military training school, boring as shit."

"Then why did you come to Asheville?"

"After I joined DPA, they put me into Team Foxtrot, which is located not far from here," Astrid laid her lips on his neck. "How is your dad?"

"He is dead," Hiccup said calmly.

"I'm sorry," after taking a moment to realize that he wasn't joking, Astrid replied. "What happened to him, if I may ask."

"He worked for Muspelheim as well, and that's why we moved to Asheville. He was a Lead Engineer, but he didn't get a lot of attention, just someone behind the scene. When he was working on a project, he had to go to San Francisco to meet with a Muspelheim's partner laboratory. Sam assigned a security team for him because he carried some classified files. He should only be staying there for two weeks, but Asgard lost contact with him and his security team.

When Asgard realized that something went wrong, they sent another team to San Francisco. The team broke into the hotel room that dad stayed, only to find that his guards were shot and killed and dad was missing."

"Where did he go?" Astrid asked.

"Six days later, local police found his body in an abandoned storehouse, in pieces, and the files were taken," Hiccup stared at the sky while telling the story. "Gobber told me the story."

"Who killed him?"

"No one knows. The authority spent ten weeks working on this, but the assassin didn't leave any tracks. They just found a picture of a horn carved on the wall of the storehouse, where they found the body."

"A horn?"

"That's what the police said."

* * *

A black SUV stopped before a house located in the country of Asheville. The members of Heimdall exited the SUV, each one wearing sunglasses and holding two black traveling bags in their hands.

"This is Eric's house?" Nina stopped and looked at the over-sized house with a pool and a tennis court in the backyard.

"One of his,' Axl replied as he opened the steel gate and walked into the front yard.

The front yard was a volleyball court sized grass field with tulips and bushes around it. The house was three stories high with a garage that could hold more than five vehicles. The roof was covered by solar panels and some satellite dishes. The decoration of the house looked like the owner copied from one of the palaces from ancient times. Nina stayed close to Axl while David and Evan dragged the blindfolded Fishlegs behind them.

"Looks fancy, but with a good security system," Nina whispered as she observed the house. She could see the hidden cameras in the corners and on the roof.

"Eric built this place into a safe house that every mercenary wants, so don't be surprised when you go in there," Axl replied as he knocked on the door.

"Hello, my old friend, I've been expecting you guys," as the door opened from inside, a five-feet-nine man with dark brown eyes wearing suit showed up. His hair was neatly brushed toward the right. "Come on in, that was a long trip, wasn't it?"

"Eric," Axl dropped his bags and hugged his friend.

"Nina, David, and Evan, so good to see you again," Eric names every member as they entered the house. Then he pointed at Fishlegs. "Oh, I guess you need someplace to keep him."

"That would be helpful," David replied as he punched Fishlegs in the belly when he tried to wriggle himself loose. "Calm down, Fish-face, you have nowhere to go."

"We have a basement, so maybe you can use that place. At least this poor guy can have a companion," Eric said as he pointed at the stairs.

"What does that mean?" Axl asked.

"I transported Heather here as well, and I locked her up in the basement. I redesigned this place. I didn't know what to do with the basement at first, so I guess it'll be a dungeon for now."

"Maybe we should put you in there as well," Evan laughed as he poked David.

"Quit messing around, we need to get info out of those two," Axl ordered. "We don't have much time."

"Axl, if I may…"

"No, Evan, you may not. Now I want to know everything that Heather and Fishlegs know," Axl bellowed. "Now get going."

* * *

"Are you sure you want to come with me?" Hiccup parked his Ford in the lot beside Asgard.

"Yeah, you know about my work, and I would like to know a little about yours," Astrid replied as she unbuckled her safety belt. "If you don't mind."

"Fine, you can come," Hiccup gave in. "But don't bring those MP7s."

"What...how do you know?"

"Metal detector," Hiccup pointed at the AC on his car. "I put a metal detector there. You hid your weapons pretty well. Your coat covered them from being seen, but metal detector can see everything."

After staring at Hiccup silently for a while, Astrid finally took out her two MP7s from her coat and put them beneath her seat.

"Am I good now?"

"All right," Hiccup opened his door. "Let's go."

"Hey Hiccup," Emma greeted her Lead Engineer as he walked into the lab. "And you must be Astrid, right?"

"That's me," Astrid replied carelessly. "You two can keep doing what you were doing before I came, and just pretend I'm not here."

"Let's go and check out the Laser," Hiccup grabbed his lab coat from his locker. "Astrid, can you stay here for a while?"

"No problem," Astrid shrugged.

"Just don't break anything," Emma added. "You can't afford them."

"That's very helpful," Astrid murmured as Hiccup and Emma exited the lab.

Hiccup and Emma walked down the hallway toward Sam's office. When they passed other guards or engineers, they all joked about the incident that happened yesterday. Since the news leaked out, Hiccup was no longer just the youngest Lead Engineer of Muspelheim, he was also the Lead Engineer with the hottest girl.

"Now I'm getting uncomfortable even when I'm walking," Hiccup said to Emma when they stopped before the door of Sam's office.

"I'm pretty curious about her as well," Emma chuckled as she knocked on the door.

Someone opened the door from inside. Gobber showed up before Hiccup and Emma with Sam standing behind him.

"Come in, you are here for the Laser, right?" Gobber stepped back.

"Yeah, I'm interested in things in Muspelheim that I don't know about," Hiccup and Emma entered Sam's office. "Let's go to this bunker."

"Seems like you've already known a lot," Sam said as he opened the wooden door of his walk-in closet.

Behind the door wasn't jackets or shirts that people usually find in a closet. An elevator sized room with metal walls showed up.

"That looks like an elevator," Emma saw the buttons on one side of the wall. "But why do you use hardened steel for an elevator?"

"This is an elevator, and those are not just hardened steel. They are mixed with beryllium," Sam knocked on the cold steel.

After the four people entered the elevator, Gobber pressed on one of the two buttons on the wall with an arrow pointing down. Unlike other elevator buttons are labeled with numbers, these two buttons only had an arrow pointing up and down.

"Ok, now I'm even more curious about a closet elevator which can stand extreme environment," Hiccup leaned on the wall as the elevator started descending.

On a monitor above the buttons, a red number decreased from zero as the elevator traveled down. "The numbers on the screen shows our depth," Sam pointed at the decreasing negative number.

The elevator stopped when the number reached "-245 meters". After Sam turned a knob beside the monitor, the metal door of the elevator started to slide open.

"Welcome to Niflheim."

* * *

**To be continued **

**A bog thank you to CajunBear73 and all readers who support this story. Please talk about how you think about this story in the comment below**


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9:

As the lights were turned on one by one like a wave, the giant underground palace lit up like a diamond before Hiccup and Emma.

"You had this place to yourself the entire time?" the size of this place shocked Hiccup. "It's like an underworld."

Rolls and rolls of metal shelves extended endlessly long deep into the mountains, even larger than the Vatican Secret Archives or New York Public Library. Hiccup couldn't even see the top of the shelves, and every shelf contained enough file boxes that could almost crash the metal holders. File boxes in a single shelf were organized in alphabetical order, and the shelves lined up in chronological order, from seven thousand years ago to 2017. Motion controlled lights provided illumination to the aisles among the shelves. Besides the countless shelves, there were also doors on one side of the wall, labeled in numerical order, from "Room 001", "Room 002", to "Room 101."

Hiccup lingered before the nearest shelf, his fingers traveled through the loaded file boxes. The boxes were lidless so that visitors can easily find the correct file. Some were printed on A4 papers or special lined papers, and some were handwritten. Hiccup even found a papyrus scroll that was sealed in a glass cylinder. From the basic information about atoms to some elements and substances that not even university chemistry professors had heard about. Besides science, Hiccup even dug out copies of DARPA and the Pentagon's documents with a red "classified" stamp on the cover.

"Where did you get all of these?" Hiccup asked as he pulled out a file about Wernher Von Braun. "Some of these are not even science-related."

"This place is called Niflheim, which pairs up with Asgard. An engineer doesn't just need science," Sam replied. "We need anything and everything. When my family gained some power a few centuries ago, we started garnering information about everything. Science, math, astronomy, military, politics, theology, mythology, blah, blah, blah, and even music. I don't even know how much information this place contains."

"So this is more like… a hobby?" Emma questioned while staring at the shelves.

"Sort of," Sam shrugged.

"The Timothy family is one of the greatest collector family in this world," Gobber added. "They even have some manuscripts that the world believes are gone."

"We've been working on top of this giant…pile of knowledge the whole time?" Hiccup couldn't find the right word to describe this place.

"That's right. This place is air-conditioned to stay dry because some of the files are hundreds of years old," Sam walked along the side wall until he reached Room 008. "Things behind these doors are engineering related stuff."

"The Laser is in there?" Hiccup asked.

Sam didn't reply. He rested his thumb on a fingerprint reader on the door. The door opened automatically after the reader scanned Sam's fingerprint.

"Everyone, say hello to the Laser," Sam said as he turned on the lights inside.

"Uhhh, that doesn't look like a scientific apparatus or something," Hiccup stared at the object at the middle of Room 008.

Two giant, arm-sized power lines connected the wall and a transparent l cylinder made of unidentified materials and could probably fit a half Hiccup in it. The outer plastic protective layers of the power lines were transparent, allowing Hiccup to see the intricate wires and… some weird cords that sometimes leaked bright beams of lights, as if the whole power line was a giant plasma ball. At the two intersections of power lines and the transparent cylinder were two funnels that concentrated the wires and cords into the cylinder.

"That looks like someone grabbed some old electronics from a trash can and put them together using duct tape," Emma snorted. "And created this Laser? Some of the cords are not even connected in the right way. And that cylinder looks like an old and clear hydrogen tank. At least do what Rutherford Appleton Lab is doing."

"This is not something you just said," Gobber replied. "We know that Project Bifrost reached a severe problem, and that is you can't let Bose-Einstein Condensation release enough energy to be used as a weapon."

"So this thing can do that?" Emma asked.

"Uhhhh…"

"Well, it's very complicated," Sam raised his left arm before Gobber and stopped him from explaining. "You know that to release energy, atoms need to have some speed, but atoms in BEC have _almost_ no speed. And if we try to increase their speed to get energy, then the status of BEC will collapse. So we need to create more energy out of that minute speed."

"And how is that gonna happen?"

"We inject energy into atoms..." Sam put his hand on the top of the cylinder.

"Excuse me, did you say 'inject'?" Hiccup interrupted his boss. "Are you saying that we are treating BEC as a... person?"

"Kind of," Sam said.

"What is this? Some sort of magic?" Emma cried. "I'm not sure how this is going to work, but are you suggesting that we change the number of protons and electrons in an atom?"

"That's one way," Gobber said.

"But then you are changing this element into another one."

"Then we just change the numbers of neutrons and electrons and leave the protons alone."

"Explain this to me," Emma stared at Sam.

"Uh, we release a great amount of energy into something, and… try to let this thing to absorb and keep the energy in it," Sam tried his best to explain the process.

"Try?" Hiccup questioned.

"Yeah, try. I never used this baby before," Sam walked to the door of this room. A piece of paper was glued to the back of the door, like an attendance sheet of a classroom. "The file says that Muspelheim received this thing in 1946, before I was born. From a laboratory somewhere in Northwestern Europe."

"Wait, wait, according to what you said, releasing a great amount of energy into BEC, but you'll destruct BEC. It'll fall apart," Emma added.

"You have a better plan then?" Gobber questioned.

Silence.

Hiccup and Emma looked at each other. Hiccup shrugged.

"Ok then, I'll let Gobber help you when you are using this," Sam said as he exited the room. "Just don't blow up this place."

The trio watched Sam entered the elevator and disappeared, Gobber opened a drawer that was built inside the wall and took out something like a drone controller and a small robot with wheels and two manipulators in front of it.

"Makes things a lot easier," Gobber flicked a switch on the robot. "I need this robot to do things for us. Sam doesn't know how to do this, and that means I know shit about it."

* * *

Meanwhile, on the third floor of Asgard.

In the room at the very end of the corridor, computers screens covered every inch of the wall. Some screens showed individual information like surveillance and some were connected to present something bigger. Five technicians wearing headphones with microphones sat in front of the screens, fingers tapping the keyboards like how a musician plays the piano. A person wearing a black baseball hat and a dark green jacket stood in the middle of the room, his arms crossed before him, and his vision traveled from one screen to another. This room didn't look like someplace you can find in a lab; no lab has twenty-five computer screens. This place was more like a basement where some hackers live.

Muspelheim put hundreds of cameras and infrared sensors in Asgard and the forest, just to keep an eye on what was going on around Asgard. At first, Sam didn't want to spend one and a half million dollars on some surveillances, but Helga used her "ultimate reasoning" to deny Sam's decision, which is "safety first".

Each screen in the room showed the image of a camera or color-coded vision from infrared sensors. Every scene of Asgard and the forest could be seen from here, from engineers and guards walking down the corridors to the secluded trees in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains. The heat map showed every heat source that infrared sensors captured and labeled them from dark blue to bright red. The engineers and guards nicknamed this room "the watcher". Basically, "the watcher" was the central control room of Asgard.

"Northwestern section 8 all clear."

"Southeastern section 5 all clear."

"Northeastern section 14 all clear."

"Outer section 21 all clear."

Technicians reported the conditions of each section to their boss, Herkman, who stood behind them. Herkman was the Technician Advisor of Asgard. Even though he didn't know as much about computer science than his technicians, but he expertised in all sorts of surveillance.

"Sir, four heat sources in Mountain section 5," a technician reported.

"Show me," Herkman walked behind the technician.

The screen presented four yellowish-red shadows that were captured by an infrared sensor.

"Are those animals? Maybe four deer or other wild lives?" Herkman asked.

"I'll double-check with a camera," the technician tapped a few commands into his computer, and then the scene of a part of Appalachian Mountains showed up on the screen. There was nothing but wild plants and tree branches with green leaves, just like another quiet and peaceful day in the forest

"The infrared sees it, but the camera doesn't," Herkman murmured, then turned to the technician. "Send out the Gray Eagle."

The Gray Eagle was a type of drone that the US military uses. Asgard's security division made a few copies of this drone and used it as the last line of their surveillance. Asgard's version of the Gray Eagle used some electromagnetic cameras that could see deeper into the spectrum.

The vision of the Gray Eagle quickly came out: four men with a lot of metals with them hid beneath some electronic camouflages.

"I need a better view!" Herkman yelled. "Those metals might be weapons!"

As the vision became clearer as the Gray Eagle decreased the altitude and the electronic camouflages could no longer hide the people beneath them, Herkman could see four men with M4s crawling slowly through the trees and toward Asgard.

"Sir, we also have some movements on The Road!" another technician cried.

His screen showed The Road, which was a two miles long paved road that connected Asgard with the outside world. The Road was usually quiet and lifeless, except when some deer or bears would wander around on The Road and when engineers were coming and leaving. But this time, at least a dozen black trucks with the white letters "SWAT" parked on The Road, officers wearing black uniforms advancing toward Asgard.

"Pull out our record. I need to see why they are here. And hack into the police system, see whether they were issued with a warrant" Herkman ordered.

The sound of keyboard tapping filled the room once again. The technicians were all brilliant computer geniuses, hacking into some governmental systems was a piece of cake to them, and they didn't even need to look down at their keyboards while tapping.

"Our record is clear, and no one issued them warrant," a technician reported. "Seems like they are dirty cops."

"Can we fire on them if they enter our private property?" Herkman asked.

"Not sure," the technician replied. "But we are sure that they are either dirty cops or fake cops."

Herkman stared at the screen, he didn't want his company to be sued because of firing at police.

"Sir, we have two guards patrolling the Road right now, and they reported that the SWAT fired at them," a technician yelled as he unplugged his headphones from his computer so that everyone in the room could hear the radio. The sound of gun firing and people screaming in pain filled the room with tree branches falling.

"One man down. I need back up right now!" a guard shouted in the radio as bullets poured down at him. "Shit! They are not the police. The police don't use the tactic of 'emptying ten mags at one person'."

"Thit's hell of a gunfight," a technician murmured.

"Screw this," Herkman murmured as he took down the red telephone on the wall and yelled: "Get me Helga!"

"Who is this?" a guard responded, with the sound of people being beaten on a mat in the background.

"This is Herkman. I believe I'm calling Helga's radio," beiHerkman asked. He dialed Helga's channel. "I need to speak to her. This is urgent!"

"Hang on, the Lead Security Officer is practicing wrestling with other guards."

"I don't care..." Herkman paused and sighed, "Code Tundra. I repeat Code Tundra."

"Code what... oh fuck. Yes, sir! Code Tundra!" the guard replied loudly.

* * *

"Ok, I think I got the hang of it," Gobber placed the robot back into the drawer.

"You do? I still have no idea how this thing works," Emma threw a punch at the wall with frustration.

"I think it's using some sort of energy magnifier to increase the energy that can be created from slow speed atoms," Hiccup stared at the exotic machine which, according to his knowledge, was based on bullshit scientific hypothesis.

250 meters below the earth's surface, Niflheim added another "mysterious" factor to Muspelheim. This company was like an onion, secrets piled up behind layers and layers of camouflage, and no one knew everything about this giant onion. It was not just once or twice that Hiccup suspected Sam had been hiding something, or the Timothy family had been hiding something.

No one knew why the headquarters of Muspelheim, Asgard, was located among the trees of the Appalachian Mountains, and no one knew why Muspelheim, or the Timothy family, decided to build an underground palace for information about anything and everything.

Hiccup used to believe that Muspelheim developed itself throughout the years and finally became one of the most advanced labs in the world. If Muspelheim put more effort into advertising their product, then probably one-fourth of their engineers would get a Nobel Prize. But now Hiccup kind of realized why Sam ordered no Muspelheim's products should have their company tags on and no company logo. If the world knew that Muspelheim had this giant underground "database", then this place would be surrounded by journalists and newspaper companies.

"I guess we can just leave it like this," Gobber concluded. "You two should finish all the other steps and come back and focus on this thing later. From my experience, I think this machine can magnify energy."

"It won't take that long," Emma replied confidently. "With the laser cooling technique, we can create BEC in just a few weeks."

"All right, if you say so," Gobber shrugged. "But I can give you a reminder: your customer said that they want their product as soon as possible, better in a month."

"A month?" Hiccup's loud voice echoed in the room. "We don't even have a design yet. Tell them that we need at least two months."

"I tried but didn't work. You can go ahead and talk to them," Gobber denied Hiccup.

"Ok, tell me how can I contact them."

"You just go 250 meters up and into your lab and convince Astrid," Gobber raised his right index finger and pointed upward.

Hiccup paused. His mouth half-open, as if he tried to say something but a person muted him.

"You see," Gobber put his hands on his hips and sighed. "Just go with one month. It's a four million dollars deal, okay?"

"I want four percent of the money."

"I can talk to Sam about that."

"You know about this place before?" Hiccup asked abruptly.

"Yeah, I'm one of the investors of Muspelheim and a very close friend of the CEO. Of course I know this place," Gobber answered.

"Then why didn't you tell us?"

"Well… because…" Gobber tapped his fingers on his pants as he tried to come up with an explanation.

A red light beam suddenly shot out from the ceiling of the room and rotated like a spinner.

"What the hell?" Emma looked up at the red alarm light as the red light beam traveled around the room.

"Something went off," Gobber unbuckled his radio from his belt. "Sam, what's going on? The alarm in Niflheim went off."

The radio crackled and the noise filled the room like something interfered the signal.

"Shit, no signal," Gobber turned his radio off.

"Code Tundra. I repeat: Code Tundra," the speaker in the wall started shouting in a computer-generated voice.

"What is Code Tundra?" Hiccup asked. Everyone in Asgard knew all the emergency codes that Muspelheim used, but he had never heard about "Code Tundra."

"Of course you never heard about it, because we only used it like… I believe this is the first time," Gobber darted out of the room and ran to the elevator. He took out a small blade from his pocket and pried open the elevator control pad. He smashed the blade into a dozen of blue and red wires like a hammer. The control pad sparkled and caused a short circuit.

"Hey! What are you doing!" Emma cried.

"Code Tundra means that Asgard is under direct ground attack," Gobber replied quickly as he scurried to a metal locker beside the door for Room 001. He placed his right thumb on the black fingerprint reader on the locker. After a blue ray inside the reader scanned across his thumb, the locker automatically opened.

"Right now I need to lock down Niflheim, and to do that I just need to destroy the elevator control system, which I already did, and no one can come in. Forget about upgraded steel and all of those shit that Sam told you: the walls and the elevator door of Niflheim is nuclear-hardened if closed, no one can open it without an access code," Gobber explained as he took out an M4 carbine from the locker. "After securing the most important files, we just leave the business to Helga."

"But if the invaders have the access code, then they are in," Hiccup cried.

"No one knows the code, except for us," Gobber withdrew a small, plastic box from the locker. A piece of paper was folded and placed in the box. "When we know everything is clear, we go out by using this code."

He threw the M4 at Hiccup and handed two pistols to Emma, "Shoot everything that passes through that door."

"You said it's nuclear-hardened."

"Nothing in this world is impenetrable."

"So we just sit here and wait it out?" Emma said, her voice shook.

"You have a better plan?"

250 meters above Hiccup, more than five dozens of SWAT officers approached Asgard, and a few hundred yards to the forest, the four members of Heimdall hid beneath their electronic camouflages.

* * *

**To be continued**

**this chapter took me a little bit longer to write, so I hope you guys enjoyed reading this one.**

**Updates will get somewhat slower, because school had just started again. **

**Thanks for supporting me. ^_^**

**Any comments? **


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Astrid leaped up from the chair which she was reading one of Hiccup's reports that she found in one of the drawers when the raging sound of gun fires reached her ears. She was way too familiar with the unique voice when a bullet leaves the gun barrel.

"Tango, Charlie, move to south corridor! Move to South corridor!" the computer-generated voice yelled through the speaker system.

Astrid paced to the window of Hiccup's lab. From there, she could see the gray paved Road that extended deep into the forest. The thick, dense trees that could block the sunlight provided a natural secluded space for the engineers to work, but also gave invaders a perfect camouflage and protection.

Three bullets that shot out of nowhere stroke the window in front of Astrid. The bullets didn't pierce into her head because the window absorbed the bullets' energy. Cracks spread across the glass like spiderwebs.

The windows of Asgard were made of triple-layered, bulletproof glass, more than 10 cm thick. A normal rifle wouldn't break the glass with a mag in close distance. Even though Astrid didn't know what "Code Tundra" meant, according to the training she received in DPA, she could sense that some sort of danger had already surrounded Asgard.

If three bullets stopped in front of her a few years ago, when she had just joined DPA, she would probably scream the hell out of her and find a closet or someplace and hide until the next day. But right now she had been through too many gunfights and cheated too many deaths that she felt numb in front of those lethal steel products.

Most of the fire came from the forest concentrated at the front door of Asgard. Muzzle flashes from behind the tree trunks looked like giant serpents flicking their tongues. Officers wearing their black uniform with the four white letters "SWAT" printed on the back of their uniforms used the tree trunks that could fit three Astrids in them as shields while pouring bullets at the guards who were positioned outside the building. Powerful steel rain covered the parking lot and everything in front of the door. Cars in the parking lot quickly turned into piles of trash under the terrifying firing. More than two guards fall with bullet holes in their heads or chests before they could raise their weapons to defend. They laid in the parking lot or front of the door, blood rushed out from their body and quickly dyed their uniforms red.

Guards who survived the first round of attack picked up their P90s and SRM 1216 shotguns and returned fire. All the practices for countering a ground attack didn't work in a circumstance when almost every inch of the ground was filled with flying bullets. The SWAT officers didn't want any captives, and if they had grenade launchers or missiles, they would probably blow Asgard into ashes already.

Brandt got pinned down behind a square, concrete post board a few yards away from the glass door of Asgard. Even though the post board was meant for engineers or guards to post hard copied announcements, but Helga ordered to add extra thick and hardened steel to make the board bulletproof, so it could provide some protection to the guards.

The ground-shaking firing already tore the announcement posters into splinters. More than two M4s pointed at the board. The concrete slowly turned into sand and rocks, only left with a 15 cm thick hardened steel between Brandt and death.

Right after he and Alex rotated to stand guard at the entrance, rifles started rattling behind the trees. Alex didn't even have the time to react before a bullet punched its way through his neck, the great impact of power almost removed his head from his body.

Bandt got lucky and had one more second than his friend to duck behind the post board, but he could do nothing but watch other guards falling around him. If he dared to reach out from the board, he would be torn into pieces just like those posters.

Astrid shot out of Hiccup's lab and ran down to the lobby of Asgard empty-handed. She tried to find her MP7s from beneath her trench coat, but then she quickly remembered that she left them in Hiccup's car. Around her, engineers threw their products and files into special storage rooms that could withstand ten tons of TNT explodes right next to it. Guards pulled out heavy weapons and transported them to the roof. Those 12.7 mm machine guns were great tools for countering infantries in large numbers. Their bullets were nothing like M4's tiny 5.56 mm bullets. Muspelheim's redesigned machine guns could cut tree trunks into half and turn human bodies into pieces.

"Where is Hiccup?" Astrid screamed at an engineer who ran down the corridor.

"I don't know. I haven't seen him since he came," the engineer's voice shuddered as he ran past Astrid and disappeared into his lab.

The entrance of Asgard was made of two giant glass door. The extra big design was meant for transporting large research apparatuses and materials, but also provided a perfect target for the invaders. The glass doors were bulletproof as well, but were only single-layered glass without extra reinforces. SWAT couldn't get through the doors at first, only filled the glass surface with cracks, but an officer threw a grenade across the parking lot like a catapult launching boulders.

The grenade did explode, the power way larger than M4 bullets shattered the glass doors with a loud "BANG." The debris of glass fanned out in a speed not slower than race cars. Sharp edges cut through Brandt's exposed skin and uniform.

He raised from behind the post board with his P90. Through the optical scope, he could see the SWAT officer tried to hide behind his tree trunk for defense. Brandt pulled the trigger of his P90, and the gun barrel launched the 5.7 mm bullets from its mag with a rate of fire of 900 rounds per minute. The officer's Kevlar didn't stop the bullets: three of them pierced through the Kevlar fiber and drilled into his heart and came out from his back.

The parking lot had turned into a kill zone, not the guards nor the SWAT officers dare to leave their protection. Asgard's parking lot was just fifty yards wide, but the crazy amount of firing brought back the feeling of trench warfare during WWI. The parking lot had been turned into a kill zone.

When Astrid reached the lobby, the floor was covered by small pieces of sharp, broken glasses and two guards' bodies with multiple bullet holes with them. Without the protection from the two glass doors, SWAT could fire directly into the building. Lights went out, tables and chairs turned into pieces, the decorations on the wall turned from drawings and pictures of famous engineers into bullet holes. Three guards returned fire from behind walls, but their accuracy became a problem due to the distance between the lobby and the trees.

"Get in here!" Astrid yelled at the guards outside. "We are outnumbered!"

Before the attack, six guards with P90s and SRM 1216 shotguns watched the parking lot, but only two survived the first few minutes of gunfighting chaos.

Brandt carefully raised his P90 and emptied the rest of his mag towards the trees, but a bullet struck his hand before he could withdraw his hand. The bullet created a giant hole in his palm, blood spurted out from his wound. Surrounding tissues were burned and turned slightly dark, and a few disconnected bones pointed outward like the spikes on hedgehogs. Brandt felt nothing at first, but then he believed that someone poked him in the hand with a baseball bat sized needle. He dropped his P90 on the ground and screamed at the top of his voice as if shouting could relieve some pain.

"Breach! Breach!" the leading officer of the SWAT team yelled after seeing Brandt being injured. He threw another grenade at the door, and the explosion ended Brandt's suffering.

SWAT officers reappeared from behind the trees and charged toward the entrance. M4s roared in their hands, bullet shells were thrown into the sky like thousands of popcorn. Astrid ducked behind a wall and covered her head by her hands. Concrete walls turned into small dust as bullets struck them, the debris of concrete covered the floor. Astrid quickly picked up an SRM 1216 from beside a body of a guard with some bullet holes in him. When the boot of the leading officer touched the floor of Asgard, Astrid tilted her body out from behind the wall just enough to allow her to take a clean shot. In a place like the lobby of Asgard, a shotgun can release its full power. The specially designed quad-tube mag of SRM 1216 can load up to 16 rounds of 12 gauge. When all 16 rounds were shot out, they will create a real "rain of death" made by hundreds of steel beads traveling at a subsonic speed. Each time when the shotgun in Astrid's hand roared, a SWAT officer would be pushed back by the great force from the shrapnel with a giant hole that could fit in two fists on his body.

* * *

"They are not good enough," David hidden under an electronic camouflage with an HK 416 in hand commented.

"Erik surely can hire some gangsters who are willing to give their lives," Nina used a telescopic sight on her rifle and watched the gunfight a few hundred yards beneath her.

The four members of Heimdall used trees and electronic camouflage and perfectly hid them among the dense trees on the mountainside above Asgard like four green ghosts. If a professional military sniper wouldn't be able to figure out their camouflage, because not everyone could get an electronic camouflage.

"When do we engage?" Nina asked as she brushed her hair away from her face.

"When those people are done with their job or after they are all dead," Axl replied.

"They can't finish the job that we assigned them," Evan said. "Muspelheim can take them out."

"What do you know? You are just a field engineer!" David joked.

"Evan is right. Eric's men are fighting for money, but they are also afraid of some overpowered enemy. But Muspelheim's guards are a bunch of die-hard followers of their company. The safety of Muspelheim is the only thing they care about," Axl took out his radio from his pocket. "Call in the second team, breach from the east side and take out Sam's office."

* * *

"They are in the building," a technician reported as the screen on his computer showed dozens of officers wearing black SWAT uniforms rushing into the building like a wave of black water.

Herkman watched the camera screens. He frowned anxiously. Even though he knew that those invaders were not real SWAT team, maybe a group of mercenaries wearing SWAT's clothes. But they were well trained, Herkman could see it. Their combat position could defend attacks from 360 degrees.

"Where is Helga? We need someone to lead the defense," Herkman asked.

"Not sure, we don't have an eye on her right now."

"Sir, Asheville PD is coming in!" another technician shouted.

On his screen, Two police cars with their sirens turned on stormed down the Road until when the SWAT trucks blocked the Road. Before the police could step out of their cars, and argue with some officers standing next to the trucks, the side doors of the trucks slammed open, machine guns pointed out from the steel doors, releasing thousands of bullets at the two poor police cars like a net made of sharp blades. Tires exploded, sirens were muted, bullet holes covered the doors and car bonnets, windshields shattered, and the cops sitting in the cars were dismembered by the 12.7 mm machine gun bullets, fresh blood flew out of the windowless doors.

"And they are gone," the technician added.

"Now we confirmed that they are not real cops," Herkman put his hands on his hip. "How many guards do we have left?"

"Around three dozens."

"Then tell them to get into the fight! Right now we only have a few guards and our guest resisting," Herkman yelled. "What the hell were they doing for the past few minutes? The gunshots didn't wake them up?"

"Yes, sir, I believe so," a technician answered. Then he moved his microphone near his mouth. "Bravo 1, Bravo 2, and Delta number 1 engage immediately. I repeat: Bravo 1, Bravo 2, and Delta number 1 engage."

"What do you mean engage? We are already engaging!" Helga's furious voice came from the radio with the sound of glass shattering and bullets punching the concrete walls in the background.

"Where are you?" Herkman snatched the radio from the technician's hand.

"East wing, where Sam's office is located!" Helga bellowed to talk over the gunshots. "They came out of nowhere."

* * *

"It's so quiet down here," Hiccup stood before a shelf and flipped through the files. "Are you sure something is off?"

"We are 250 meters below the surface. Of course we can't hear shit," Gobber leaned on a wall with the M4 within reach.

On the surface, gunshots could be heard more than five miles away, like thunderbolts striking the earth, but in Niflheim, Hiccup could only hear the breath of Gobber, Emma, and himself.

"You said this place is air-conditioned, but I feel like we are in a giant underground oven," Emma complained. Her sweat adhered her long hair to her face. She took off her lab coat, only wearing her white t-shirt decorated by all sorts of chemical formulas. And after a few minutes, she decided to throw off the t-shirt as well. "You guys don't mind, right? This place is warm like hell," Emma looked at Hiccup and Gobber with her hands on the hem of her t-shirt, ready to toss it off. The front and back of her t-shirt was already drenched by her sweat and turned the fiber dark gray.

"Only if you are wearing something _else _beneath that t-shirt," Gobber warned. "This place is also under surveillance, so I don't want to see a nude woman wandering around in the most classified place of Muspelheim."

"Of course," Emma murmured as she lifted her t-shirt and threw it aside.

"Wow, you really put some effort into it," Hiccup stared at Emma.

Beneath her shirt, she wore a black "laboratory" bra which all female engineers in Muspelheim loved to wear. This specially designed underwear can provide another layer of protection to the skin from corrosive and other dangerous chemicals that were used frequently during experiments. But Hiccup wasn't looking at her chest, he looked at her midriff which was covered by six squares of muscles. "This?" Emma ran her fingers through her hair and tied them into a ponytail behind her head so that they wouldn't stick to her face by her sweat. "I work out as well. Two hours a day. Six-pack doesn't come out of nowhere."

"Gobber do we have a lot of this kind of engineers around here?" Hiccup asked Gobber.

"How am I supposed to know," Gobber cried. "I can't just go up to an engineer and lift his or her shirt and check whether they have a six-pack or not."

"Hey Hiccup, you don't feel warm?" Emma asked after realizing that she stripped her upper body except for her bra, but Hiccup was still wearing his lab coat over a long-sleeved shirt.

"If you stop being so active and energetic and try to calm down," Hiccup turned back to the files in front of him. "You might not feel that warm."

Since Gobber locked down Niflheim, Emma tried to run to the end of the shelves and come back and romped around among the shelves like a little girl, just trying to enjoy some free time that Muspelheim engineers rarely had. On the other hand, Hiccup had been reading those files and Gobber was leaning against the wall to take a nap.

"When can we go up?" Emma asked with great impatience.

"Until they tell us through the speaker," Gobber replied with his eyes closed.

"And how long is that going to take?"

"Until they finished dealing with their business. I don't know the exact time because I don't know what's going on up there, and our job right now is to make sure that no files or apparatuses go out of this place, no matter the cost."

"And what's wrong with the ac?"

"Maybe they cut off the power line, or it got damaged," Gobber checked a thermometer on the wall. "It's just 95 degrees."

"What do you mean by 'just 95 degrees'?" Emma yelled.

"This place is closer to the core than the surface, and that means we will be receiving more heat," Gobber placed his right palm on the wall. "Mmmm, kind of warm without the ac. Might cause some program failure for some equipment in those rooms."

"Do you know that this file talks about Alan Turing and says that he might be the first person to invent the computer, not those people in Pennsylvania," Hiccup said. "I knew it! I knew Alan Turing is the creator of computer."

"Cut it off, Hiccup," Emma grabbed the t-shirt that she dropped on the ground and threw it toward Hiccup. "Why don't you use the time to work on Project Bifrost and figure out how on earth are we going to release enough energy."

"Wow," Hiccup turned his head at the sweaty t-shirt that landed on his shoulder. "You are the second girl who throws her clothes at me."

"Who is the first one?" Emma asked. Then she paused. "Never mind. We all know."

* * *

Astrid threw away the emptied P90 mag and found a new one from a pocket on a guard's body and ran down a corridor, bullets followed her on the ground. After holding the lobby on her own for five minutes, the SWAT officers forced her to retreat to the corridors. She didn't know why Muspelheim hadn't sent out more reinforcements even though the gunfight had started for more than ten minutes. Astrid stopped when she reached the stairway, walked a few stairs up and rested herself on the wall. She breathed heavily, trying to grasp more air to refill her lungs, her chest rose and fell. She cursed the officers as she slid the new mag into the P90.

"Over there!" an officer yelled as the wall started shattering under heavy firing.

This wall wasn't reinforced, that means the concrete would be in pieces in a matter of minutes, and Astrid's body would be filled by bullets.

The lights in the corridors went black as bullet waves struck them, wires and circuits zapped and sparked. The muzzle flashes from the M4 rifles lightened the dark corridors as well as the emotionless faces of the officers when they put a bullet into the injured guards lying on the floor.

A woman wearing yellow desert camouflage uniform jumped down from the stairway from the second floor, holding an M249 in her hand. The machine gun roared as soon as she landed on the messy floor covered by shattered concrete, glass pieces, and gores from the dead bodies. The corridor was a great place for the machine gun to slaughter lives since the compact space made it impossible to miss the black uniforms.

The noise from the M249 almost broke Astrid's eardrum as if someone ignited a firework right beside her. The small compact space even further magnified the noise. She turned away from the gun and covered her ears to decrease the noise. Her face distorted from the pain that her ears were receiving. When the gun stopped pouring out bullets, Astrid turned deaf at first and the only thing she could hear was a loud buzzing sound like after a bomb exploded next to her.

As Astrid slowly regained her hearing, the corridor turned dead quiet, except for the electric sparks from circuits. No more officers shouting and no more gun firing. The officers' bodies were torn apart by the machine gun bullets, dismembered arms and legs laid in the corners, and the walls turned scarlet as if someone painted the walls carelessly with red paint.

"I read your file," Helga said as she dropped the M249 which the gun barrel turned slightly red from constantly shooting on the ground and took out two Beretta 92Fs from her holster on her right thigh. She walked through the bodies, firing at the officers who magically survived with one or two bullets in their bodies. "You are not that bad. You can take them out no problem. They are not real SWAT."

"Everything is under my control," Astrid replied harshly at the woman who pointed at her with a gun when Astrid first visited Asgard.

"Yeah, seems like it," Helga snorted as she put a bullet through the surviving officers' heads, just like what they did to the guards a few seconds earlier. She then dashed up the stairs and disappeared at the direction where more gunshots came from.

* * *

**To be continued**

**This chapter is basically actions, and I'll return to the main storyline of the story in next chapter. **

**Thank you all for the support**

**Please point out my mistakes in the story and share how you think about the story down below.**

**(I heard news that dreamworks is going to release a new dragon short film, is that true?)**


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11:

The gunfight still lasted for another twenty minutes after the real SWAT team had arrived. A total of forty fake SWAT officers participated in the attack and caused Muspelheim to lose seven engineers and fifteen guards. The damage that the building received might need a few months to repair. Electricity circuits needed to be replanted, some labs were completely blown apart, and some walls had turned into ashes and debris of concrete.

"What the hell happened here?" Gobber yelled as he, Emma, and Hiccup exited the elevator.

Just like a suicide car bomb struck Sam's office, the wooden furniture turned into black charcoal, those giant glass windows became the sharp, shiny glass pieces on the ground, the walls were carbonated under unidentified heat and turned black, bullet holes wasted the computers and microscopes. Windows shattered into small crystal pieces and the power lines on the roof sparkled. The scariest part was the dead bodies and dismembered arms and legs and even a skull with black combat helmet lay beside Sam's burnt sycamore wood table.

"How is Niflheim?" Sam ran through the mess to Gobber and shook him with great anxiety on his face.

"What happened to you?" Gobber looked at the CEO of this company. Gobber didn't recognize him at first.

Sam's neatly brushed dark hair that was covered by gel had all straightened up like he was touching a plasma globe, some part of his exposed arms and face were burnt and turned slightly black, ashes from the concrete wall covered his white shirt and hair, and a few wounds on his legs which fresh blood still leaked out. He seemed like a soldier who just walked out from the battlefield, clothes covered by gore and dust.

"It doesn't matter," Sam put his hands on Gobber's shoulders and looked at his eyes. "Tell me, brother. Was Niflheim save and untouched?"

"Uhh...I guess so…" Gobber said carefully, looking back at Sam, whose eyes reflected the fear and anxious like a father waiting for his newborn baby. This was the first time Gobber seeing Sam so nervous and so apprehensive. "At least we didn't see anyone descending from the elevator."

After receiving Gobber's confirmation, Sam smiled, revealing his white teeth, which were the only part of his body which still revealed his identity.

"A group of fake SWAT attacked us," Helga walked into the completely destroyed office with a Beretta in her right hand. "And a severe gunfight took place in Sam's office. They firebombed this place."

"I don't care about my office when Niflheim is under potential threat," Sam took out his phone from his pocket, also covered by dust. Then he turned to Hiccup and Emma. "This place is not safe for Project Bifrost to process, and I need to move you two to a safer place."

"Where is Astrid?" Hiccup ignored Sam and asked Helga who stood behind him.

"She is fine, no need to worry about her," Helga shrugged. "I think with Astrid by his side, he will be safe while working at anywhere."

"And you need to fix the ac in Niflheim," Emma pointed at Sam. "Otherwise you should rename that place the 'underground oven.' "

"Those are small problems," Sam tapped a few codes into his phone. "I know Astrid is a skilled agent, but I need to make sure that Project Bifrost is completely secured until we fixed up this mess."

Hiccup didn't listen to what Sam was saying, he walked out of the office. The corridor that he met with Astrid a day ago looked like a tank bombed it, walls covered with bullet holes.

Someone hugged him from behind. It was Astrid. Her blond hair was all tangled up with blood drops among them. A wound on her right shoulder drenched her trench her shirt and trench coat. Another cut on her face extended from her left eyebrow and down to the tip of her nose as if someone dragged a paper-knife across her face. Her black tactical boots reflected the lights in Asgard when she entered the building in the morning, but right now it was covered by gray concrete ash and blood.

"Thank god you are safe," she sighed with great relief and rested her jaw on his shoulder.

Hiccup turned around and pulled Astrid closer to him, massaging her blood-drenched hair. She held onto him so tightly that Hiccup felt that his limbs were going to break. He finally realized that his relationship with Astrid came back on track after around a decade. Helga watched the duo in the corridor. During the gunfight in the lobby, she watched for a while on the second floor before jumping down with the M249. Astrid fought like a female lion protecting her territory, and clearly went through professional training, but in front of Hiccup, she became a sloth holding on to a tree.

"Are you guys done? We still have a building to rebuild," Sam cried at the duo standing outside of his office. "And Astrid Hofferson, I do appreciate your assistant during the raid, but I do _not_ appreciate you distracting our best engineer."

* * *

"You said we strike right now?" Evan asked. "The authorities are in there."

"That's kind of hard to do," Axl scratched his head. "We missed the perfect timing."

"More than two dozens of actual SWAT officers around the building… and double the cops…national guards are coming in as well..." Nina reported. She examined the half-ruined concrete building through her binoculars. "What is Helga doing alone on the roof?"

"What do you mean?" David asked.

"Helga is sitting at the edge of the roof, holding some sort of...paper in her hand and reading it," Nina murmured as she maximized the magnifying degree. "No...it's not a paper. It's a photo."

"What photo?" Axl looked at Nina.

Usually, after half an hour of an intense gunfight with bullets missing them by an inch and making small decisions that would've cost their lives, a normal soldier would get some hot tea or coffee, if available, to calm down his or her nerves. Evan, as a witness, even felt uncomfortable when watching the fake officers throwing things like Molotov Whiskey into Sam's office, but Helga decided to look boringly at a picture on the rooftop.

Nina didn't answer. She just held the binoculars before her eyes silently.

"I'm talking to you, Nina," Axl poked her shoulder.

"Look it yourself," Nina in a strange way and handed the dark green, military leveled computer-powered binoculars that could see the face of a man clearly from three miles away to Axl.

He put the scope before his eyes and adjusted his arms into a more comfortable position. Then he silenced when his vision landed on that picture, just like Nina did a few seconds ago.

"Helga you motherfucker," Axl murmured.

"Give this to me," Evan seized the binoculars from Axl's hand. He froze like a statue when his vision landed on the picture in Helga's hands.

"What is it?" David took out his sight from his pocket at mounted it on his HK 416 as a replacement of the binoculars. "Who is that?"

On Helga's photo, a man with dyed sky blue hair and emerald eyes wearing a forest camouflage was smiling. He was at least six and a half feet tall, scars covered his exposed skin as if he just walked out from one-to-one combat with a bear. He rolled up his long sleeves to present his chocolate-colored arm with a tattoo of Apollo's bow, muscles flowed under his skin like rocks and blood vessels traveled across his exposed skin like multiple indigo snakes slithering down his body. A Tac-50 rested beside his feet, the long gun looked like a toy compared to his massive body.

None of the other three members of Heimdall answered David's question. They looked at each other, exchanging silent communications.

"Who is the soldier in that picture?" David asked again.

"How does Helga get his picture?" Axl mumbled loudly, ignoring the bewildered David.

"Helga is his girlfriend," Evan squeezed the words out of his mouth, staring blankly into the forest as if he didn't make that startling conclusion. "He told me that he got himself a girl somewhere...but this is so wrong! We are fighting against our former brother's...girlfriend? It's like when Eisenhower was leading the Allies' attack, but his enemy turned out to be Bradley's wife."

"Who?" David looked at his friends who looked like they saw ghosts floating before them.

"His name is Albert Manstein. A former member of us, a brilliant sniper, " Nina sighed before explaining it to David. Her voice was low and deep, unlike her joyful, careless tone. She put her hand on David's shoulder. "You are an excellent fighter and vanguard, David. But to be honest, you are a replacement. Have you realized that we don't have a sniper in our team?"

"Because you lost your sniper?" David asked carefully.

"Yeah. When we were at the shore of Persian Gulf, in 1999, that's before you joined us, we were on a mission to destroy a harbor that was suspected to host a group of soldiers. A local warlord paid us a lot of money for that, and that was even before Eric sponsored us. We had to take that mission. We needed money to keep living and feeding ourselves," Nina said. "But that was a trap, the so-called warlord was a government agent. The harbor did host some soldiers, but they were prepared for our attack."

"So you guys got ambushed?"

"We got our asses kicked. We were being cornered by at least two companies and an armored battalion. Soldiers pushed us toward the sea and cornered us. Evan got wounded badly, two bullets punched through his Kevlar and into his chest, yet we couldn't stop the bleeding. And when we tried to break their ambush, he volunteered to take the other path to draw away the soldiers," Nina sighed. "It worked. I and Axl ran the hell out of us. We sprinted five miles with all of our gear and carrying Evan in about 20 minutes, and the soldiers finally gave up and turned back and went after him."

"Did he survive?"

"We don't know. After we had a chance to look back, he disappeared. We tried to find him, but we found nothing. Only the sound of his Tac-50 traveled into our ears."

"I see," David replied a bit later. "So to fill in space, you got me."

"That's true."

"Good tale. I believe you guys had a good time with him."

"Yeah, you heard Evan unconsciously calling him 'our brother'?"

* * *

"_Axl, take them and go! I can distract their attention to give you a chance!" the tall sniper yelled at his commander._

_Axl watched Albert numbly, bullets flew beside them. He held the dying body of Evan between his arms, blood burst out from his mouth. Evan still tried to say something, but his blood clogged his throat, his rifle lay beside his body, covered by dirt. Nina constantly fired back at the advancing soldiers, trying to stop the giant wave of armor. _

"_Axl! If you don't leave now, Evan is going to die!" Albert boomed, trying to talk over the gun firings and explodings. He stood up from behind the boulder and emptied the clip of his Tac-50. _

_Axl didn't reply. He couldn't leave any of his team behind. But the only way to save Evan was trying to drive away the soldiers' attention. _

_Albert picked up Evans rifle from the ground, "I'll run to the hills in the south and attract their attention, and you and Nina can take the north route and bring Evan out!" Albert didn't wait for Axl's reply and took off into the open field. The six and a half feet man could run nearly as fast as someone on a bicycle. Axl didn't even know that he could sprint that fast. _

_Just like what Albert had predicted, the firing toward Axl and Nina suddenly decreased. Soldiers yelled as they turned around and headed for Albert, bullets struck the ground behind him. Military Humvees turned their wheels and headed toward the running figure, the machine gun on their turrets rattled. Infantries followed their armors. _

_Axl raised from behind the boulder, where he ducked the bullets, and looked toward the direction where Albert took off at. The tall figure of Albert turned into a small black dot next to the horizon. Axl's eyes dimmed, no more of his sharp, philosophical sight. The castle in his heart which was made of their four's friendship collapsed. Since they decided to create "Heimdall", they haven't lost one member. Most of Heimdall's members had no families, so they relied on each other to survive in this world. But when witnessing Albert jumped out from behind the boulder and took off, like a bird being freed from its cage, Axl lost one room of his shaky family. _

_Nina inserted a new mag into her rifle and turned toward Axl. Right now, with one member of the team running off to attract the attention of their enemy, Evan struggling to keep breathing, and their leader facing mental chaos, Nina decided to take over the team. _

"_Get up, Axl. We need to get out of this place before Albert being torn apart!" Nina yelled beside Axl's ears as she grabbed his arms, trying to pull him up. "You don't want him to die in vain, don't you?"_

_Axl knew that Nina was right. Before the soldiers capture Albert and put a bullet through his head, they still had time to run for their lives. _

* * *

"He sacrificed himself to save me," Evan murmured.

Everyone silenced for a minute.

"We retreat," Axl broke the silence and switched his rifle to safe. He struggled to drag his thoughts back from his flashback. "I need to meet with Davis the alchemist again."

* * *

In the dark basement of Eric's villa ten miles away from Asheville, two figures wiggled on two metal chairs which were connected to the concrete floor, trying to break free from the restraints. A heavy boy still wearing his white lab coat and a woman with long dark brown hair. The only light was turned off, and the only illumination came from a small window that was at the top of the wall which provided fresh air for the basement.

"Stop trying, Fishlegs and Heather," Nina said as she walked down the stairs. She wore a simple light blue blouse with jeans. She sauntered around the duo, a steel hawkbill blade spinning around her finger. "No one will show up and rescue you."

"What do you want, bitch?" Heather growled.

"Everything in your brain. Contact information, locations, fire power of your team, everything," Nina bent over and hissed beside Heather's right ear. Then she patted Fishlegs's shoulder. He tried to yell and make enough sound so that pedestrians could hear them from the small open window, but his mouth was gagged by a cloth that someone rolled up into a ball. "Your friend here had told us enough about Asgard, and now I want to know more about its clients. Where is the safe house for DPA Team Foxtrot?"

Heather did not yell or freak out when she realized that someone kidnapped her. A DPA agent would not freak out in front of anyone, even death itself. When Eric's men, who pretended to be police, tried to capture Heather, it took five strong and muscular men to control and restrain her.

"It's in your asshole," Heather spat at Nina.

"Hmmm…" Nina held the blade firmly in her hand. She rested the tip of the blade on Heather's left cheek, not hard enough to cut open her skin, slightly denting Heather's facial skin. Nina then slowly drifted the blade down Heather's face and to her neck, like how a hunter trying to pick the right spot to cut open a deer's stomach that she just shot. The blade then trailed around her collarbone as if Nina was drawing a picture on Heather's skin. "Others like Evan or Axl might have some more patience when talking with you, but I don't. You just wasted your only chance."

"Just cut my head down," Heather raised her head and looking straight at Nina.

"No, no, that would ruin all the fun," Nina replied in a soft, baby-like voice like how a mother comforts her newborn child.

"Wouldn't it be even more fun to chop open someone's head?" her chest rose and fell as Heather breathed heavily. "I would do that if I were you."

Nina didn't reply. She looked at Heather's exposed upper chest when she raised her head. Sweat covered Heather's skin like tiny pieces of crystals that were placed beneath lights. Nina moved the blade to Heather's throat, slowly adding her power onto the tip of the blade.

"You know that I'm not a cold-blooded killer. I don't enjoy killing others. I'm a… weirdo," Nina smirked at Heather.

"What kind of weirdo?" Heather tried her best to lean back and leave more space between her throat and the tip of Nina's blade.

"You know, some crazy gal in a club. A whore, that's what my targets always say."

"You think this can scare me?" Heather snorted.

"I wasn't trying to scare you," Nina knelt before Heather so that she could look at her without looking down. "I want to have some fun for myself until you give up and tell me everything you know."

In the following hours, Fishlegs watched the horrifying scene in the basement: Nina walked around Heather, using her hawkbill blade stabbing and cutting Heather randomly, and sometimes she threw punches at Heather's head or stomach until Nina didn't need ropes to restrain Heather. After a few minutes, Nina cut Heather lose and threw her to the ground like throwing a bag of potatoes. The hawkbill cut Heather's clothes into pieces and stripes, and her skin was covered with blade cuts and wounds. Her right eye swollen and turned red and turned slightly blue after Nina's sidekick landed directly on her face. Nina straddled on Heather and cut open Heather's trench coat and the shirt with interest, indulging the action of removing someone's clothes with a blade, her tongue slipped across her upper lips.

Fishlegs wiggled in his chair, trying to break free and end the inhumane actions. He was an engineer, not a soldier who could withstand these bloody scenes. He knew that even though he wasn't restrained, he couldn't defeat Nina and all the other people who kidnapped him from England. He tried to scream, but only to be muffled by the gag in his mouth. The nylon rope dug into his skin and left numerous red marks on his wrists and arms.

Nina used her knee to pin Heather's neck to the ground and penetrated Heather's shirt with her blade and ripped open her shirt.

Heather tried to fight back, a DPA agent wouldn't go out without a fight, but the hawkbill pierced into her right shoulder and dragged across her muscle, cutting her muscle in half while leaving a wound so deep that her pale white shoulder bone was exposed in the air. Heather yelled furiously, here scream bounced around the gray, concrete walls of the basement. She tried to cover her wound with her left palm so that she wouldn't die because of exsanguination. But that didn't help much, fresh blood dripped out from between her fingers like a small waterfall.

"That's better," Nina laughed as she licked the blood off from the blade.

"What the hell is going on?" David walked down the stairs which was filled with Heather's painful shrieks. "What's this?"

"How to deal with someone who doesn't want to talk," Nina shrugged.

"Ok, you can play, but not too hard, ok?" David watched the half-naked Heather on the ground, tossing and turning as if she was submerged into a pool filled with acid. Nina's hawkbill blade was so sharp that cutting through clothes was like a red hot knife slicing through butter. "What did you do to her clothes?"

"I removed them."

"Jesus Christ," David murmured as he walked up the stairs to get away from the bloody scene. "Don't forget to treat her wounds, we don't want her to die because of infection."

"Fine," Nina complained as she watched David disappeared up the stairs. Then she turned toward Heather on the ground, a small pond of blood gathered beneath her shoulder.

"Lucky girl," she drove her leather boot into Heather's belly with frustration before walking to a closet in the corner and took out a first aid kit, the hawkbill blade still spun among her fingers.

* * *

The sky turned completely dark when Hiccup and Astrid stepped into a burger restaurant in downtown Asheville. They sat down at the table next to the entrance, with a window that overlooked the road. Astrid was still wearing her trench coat, but with her two MP7s beneath the cloth. She managed to dig out her guns from Hiccup's Ford which seemed to be "fucked by a thousand bullets", that was what the county sheriff said when he arrived at Asgard. Astrid decided to eat outside to stay away from the danger. Hiccup didn't object. Right now the whole mountain was filled with cops, and the North Carolina National Guards were sweeping through the mountains.

The scene of Sam's burnt office still flashed in Hiccup's brain like a movie. Especially the dead body of a Muspelheim's guard, who got his whole lower body chopped off by something and his upper body turned charcoal black under some sort of extreme heat. Helga said that it was a firebomb.

Although Astrid wasn't sure about whether the gunfight mentally shook her boy, she didn't see that on Hiccup's face. But she could feel Hiccup's body shivered slightly without laying her hand on his skin. Even after all these years, she could still predict Hiccup's emotions and actions.

After watching police cars and military trucks filled with soldiers rushing across the city, downtown became quieter than usual. Normally every night people would fill the theaters, shopping malls, and restaurants in downtown. Today only a few dozens of people wandered on the street, the neon lights of the stores stood alone beside the streets, attracting the clients who would not show up in a few days.

This burger restaurant didn't attract as many customers as usual, and actually, Astrid and Hiccup were the only two people who entered this place the whole night even though that was the best burger restaurant in Asheville.

They focused on their food, but Hiccup constantly turned his head toward a black dictionary sized box computer hard drive beside him. That was the hard drive of his lab's central computer. Every lab in Asgard had a computer system that can access surveillance of the lab and engineers can use this computer system to access the internet and all sorts of databases, communicate with other laboratories around the world on a secure line, and calculate complex scientific equations. This computer system was just an overpowered personal computer. Hiccup stored all the most important data and information about his projects in his computer system, but now he didn't feel safe to leave the drive alone in his lab.

Two people wearing the exact trench coat that Astrid was wearing pulled the door of the restaurant door open and walked in. They grabbed themselves some chairs and sat down beside Astrid. One of the women threw her sheath with a WWI bayonet in it on the table with great tiredness in her actions. The leather sheath slid across the smooth table and stopped beside Astrid's burger.

Hiccup unconsciously placed his left hand on the hard drive to protect it.

"What happened?" Astrid asked the women.

"Charleston was a trap," Valka replied powerless, unlike her deep, commanding tone. Her face lost the usual light pink color and turned slightly white, without the sight of life. "We lost two members. Clever and Ashely."

Astrid stopped chewing. She stared at the golden fries in her plate. The "happy" couple of DPA Team Foxtrot, Clever and Ashely. Astrid knew them very well. They amused everyone in the team by performing dances and playing violin. Astrid wouldn't be surprised that they died due to trying to save each other. DPA didn't have a lot of members, and Team Foxtrot only had twelve agents, so they were like a family without a bloodline, and right now they just lost one-sixth of their family.

"Who killed them?" Astrid groaned.

"No idea," Ruffnut replied. "Clever stepped on a mine, and Ashely tried to disarm it, but there were no wires on that thing. It was a controlled mine. Someone must have been watching and remoting it because the mine went off. We detected radio waves so 99% that was a controlled bomb. That's how they died."

"And we lost contact with Heather," Valka added.

Hiccup watched the three women exchanged conversations quietly. Some were normal chats but some were about classified names and contacts in DPA. Astrid sometimes winked at him, showing that nothing bad was happening, but he could feel the energy flowing through the three women, like an army preparing for battle.

"The good news is that Interpol provided us information that Axl McDowell might show up in Zurich, Switzerland," Valka picked up a fries from Astrid's plate and ate it.

"How does the Interpol suddenly know everything?" Astrid asked.

"Because a person threw a recorder pen with the phone record between Axl McDowell and a professor of Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich into the headquarters of Interpol," Valka pulled out her phone and played a security camera footage of a man throwing a small black box through the doors of a building and ran off.

"Facial identification?"

"Already did it," Valka stared at Astrid. "That dude's name is Albert Manstein. Have you heard about this name before?"

"Sounds familiar," Astrid replied, thoughtfully.

* * *

**To be continued**


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 12:

"Are you sure we can trust this Albert Manstein? I'm pretty sure he is under CIA's list of 'assume terminated'," Astrid pulled out her phone and typed in a set of passwords. A photo of someone's face showed up with dyed sky blue air, emerald eyes, and dark chocolate skin. Two dotted red lines formed an X across his photo.

"He is wanted by the CIA?" Ruffnut's eyes widened.

"Was. The CIA believes that he is dead. According to their intelligence, Albert Manstein, member of Heimdall, was shot and killed in 1999 near the shore of the Persian Gulf by Saudi Arabia army," Astrid replied.

"Then why this says he is 'assume terminated'?"

"Because they didn't find his body. The file says that after a machine gun emptied a whole belt at him, he disappeared. No blood, no broken limbs, no tracks, just disappeared."

"Is he trying to help us or the hard drive is some sort of computer virus?"

"Technicians in the Interpol didn't identify any sorts of malware or potential electrical threat. The hard drive is clean."

"Ok, so now the problem is why he wants to help us."

* * *

When Hiccup woke up at night, Astrid was still beside him, her naked body covered by Hiccup's dark brown blanket sleeping on her stomach with her hands buried beneath her white pillow. Her bare back rose and fell with rhythm as she breathed softly. The opaque curtains covered the windows completely, not allowing any bright moonlight to peak through. He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling with his hands underneath his head, clearing his mind from yesterday's chaos and panic. He knew that Project Bifrost was not just some random deal with a client, but an obstacle that Muspelheim spent more than five decades trying to fix. The math equations flashed across his mind, complex calculations took place in his brain as if he was a human-powered computer. His left hand unconsciously landed on Astrid's uncovered back and gently rubbed her spine. After the attack his research reached a bottleneck, since during the gunfight one of the invaders threw a grenade into the lab that stored the only laser cooling machines in Asgard, and that was a key element of making Bose-Einstein Condensate. Those machines were not something that you could get from the Best Buy down the road.

He already started building one with the remaining materials that Asgard had on hand. He was not an expert at states of matters, but when it came to straight engineering like making some machines, he was the god of this field.

Sleepiness slowly crept up his body in the dim room, trying to put him back to sleep. He could still have three hours of sleep before going to work. He turned his body toward Astrid and stroke her blond hair. When he picked up a small wisp of her hair, it revealed a small part of black metal sticking out from beneath her pillow. His curiosity shook him awake immediately.

He placed his right hand on the exposed metal, smooth as silk but cold as ice. Hiccup then slowly lifted the heavy pillow with Astrid's head on it, trying his best to not wake her. Two brand new MP7s unveiled. Astrid's two hands gripped the handle of the guns tightly and index fingers placed around the trigger.

That's why she came back late last night, Hiccup thought. Astrid left her two MP7s in the glove box of Hiccup's Ford, but the gunfight at the parking lot turned it into waste. She went out yesterday night and got two new ones from a nearby gun store. Astrid had all the reasons in the world to replace her arms later, but she decided to do so right after the incident. For their safety.

And she still wouldn't let go of the arms even when she was asleep so that she could react faster when something happened. Hiccup was sure that it was she who covered the windows last night, not leaving a single gap.

Hiccup froze, then the tips of his mouth curved up into a smile. Everything was back on track.

Suddenly someone shoved him away from the sleeping Astrid violently and threw a powerful punch at his left side of his face. Hiccup could feel that the attacker was trained, and the punch almost broke his skull. His head was thrown backward and he fell on the mattress on his back. His cheek skin burned as if someone poured a bottle of boiling water on his head. Then two hands pinned him onto the bed, the powerful grips prevented him from escaping, fingers dug deep into his shoulder skin. The punch made him dizzy, he blinked a few times, the entire world spun like a fidget spinner, throwing his mind into temporary chaos. Hiccup could feel that someone was on top of him, probably a female, locking his neck to the pillow with her elbow to prevent Hiccup from raising his head. A small, ice-cold tube landed on his forehead. In the darkness, he could see nothing, but he knew that the small tube was the muzzle of a gun.

A beam of strong light as bright as staring directly at the sun appeared before his face. He squinted his eyes to avoid the eye-piercing brightness, turning his head away from the light source. He tried to cover his eyes with his hands, but they were pinned to the sheet as if two iron bars locked his wrists on the bed. He could see the weapon above his forehead, and the cold surface of it shivered Hiccup, like how death reaches out for its victim. If whoever was holding the weapon pulled the trigger, he would be right on his way to Valhalla. No one can survive when a bullet punches through his or her brain.

"What the...Jesus...I thought...I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," Astrid's shuddering voice came into his ears when the shaft disappeared after she turned off the flashlight. She jumped off the bed and walked across the room to turn on the lights.

Her hair was tangled up after sleeping face down, a handful of scars located across her body. Hiccup pushed himself up, sitting against the headboard, panting heavily. Hiccup had seen firearms, grenades, and even shoulder missiles all the time, since the guards of Muspelheim loved to wander around Asgard, so it was hard not to see some six and a half feet muscular men and women walking down the corridor with a shotgun or assault rifle in hand. Those arms never scared Hiccup. He knew that if some muttonheads dared to interrupt the best engineer in Muspelheim, those muzzles would turn at the stupid intruder.

This time, he felt the dark side of those arms, the horrible breath like those blood-thirsty beasts. He pushed himself against the headboard, trying to keep distance between himself and Astrid, wrapping himself with the blanket as if it was a bullet-proof shield. It was not Astrid that Hiccup tried to avoid, but the loaded MP7 dangling in her left hand. The weapon that almost took his life a few seconds ago. Astrid looked at Hiccup, his eyes no longer contained life, blank as a piece of paper. Astrid walked slowly and carefully toward the bed and sat down beside him. She could see a red mark appeared on his left cheek, since she punched him with her right elbow.

She dropped her weapon on the ground, the metal thing landed on Hiccup's brown carpet without a sound.

"I'm so so sorry, Hiccup..." Astrid whispered. She didn't know how to comfort him. She used to calm Hiccup down and soothe him after him getting beaten to hell by bullies, but that was around a decade ago. In DPA, no one comforted her when she was hurt or injured. She became an independent person. Her teammates fought side by side with her during missions, but they would prefer to watch her suffer instead of helping her out.

She reached her hands for Hiccup's auburn hair, combing his tangled hair into the original straight and neat brown cascade.

"Sorry Hiccup…" that was the only thing she knew what to say. "I should've trusted you… I knew that was you…"

She sat down next to him, surrounding Hiccup's shoulder with her left arm and enveloping him with her body. The room was fairly cool at night, but she didn't put on her clothes. Hiccup didn't move, and he just stared forward blankly.

"It's ok. I shouldn't touch your weapons," Hiccup's lips parted and the smooth voice came out from his mouth.

"Don't say that," Astrid laid a light kiss on his cheek.

"Forget about it," Hiccup shook his head. "You are part of the military, right? Or something similar to that. I understand you."

"I can't forget about this. I can't forget about almost killing my love. Will you forget if you almost killed me?"

Hiccup didn't answer.

"Can we start over again?" Astrid whispered by his ears.

Hiccup turned and looked at the blonde beside him, puzzled. "I thought we already restarted."

"I mean we go back to Charleston, the beach, and the sunsets and sunrises. We can continue doing what we did when we were nine. I checked the government records, your father's house is still under his and your name. DPA means nothing to me. I am in that thing because I was lonely in society, but after you showed up again, I don't need the people in DPA to replace my family. I can quit that thing whenever I want. You are my family Hiccup," Astrid finally threw out the words that she hid in her mind since she met Hiccup. She was too afraid to say that to Hiccup before.

Hiccup's emerald eyes lightened, but his eyelashes quickly dropped and his eyes turned dim again.

"I want to go with you, and I actually planned that before, but…" He paused, "I can't. Engineering is my life… I mean you can leave DPA whenever you want, but I can't just leave Asgard and Muspelheim. They can't finish things without me."

Astrid looked at Hiccup. Her fingers traveled across Hiccup's arms and back, mapping the scars that he got from years of dangerous experiments and testing. He avoided her glance, staring at the blanket. An awkward silence fell into the room.

"How about after finishing Project Bifrost, we go back to Charleston?" Astrid suggested.

"How do you know its name?"

"I know everything that is going on in Muspelheim," Astrid smirked. She straddled on Hiccup's thighs, her right hand lifted Hiccup's jaw, forcing Hiccup to look up at her, "So, what do you think?"

"I'll think about that," Hiccup nodded slowly.

"That's more like it," Astrid smiled, laying down next to him, her ocean blue eyes blinked at the man beside her.

* * *

At the campus of Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich.

On weekdays, the massive campus was filled with students traveling between buildings and buildings with books heavy like stones in their hands. But on weekends, the crowdedness of the campus turned into quietness, like when someone explores deep into the forest, away from the society, they can hear nothing but the hummings from birds and whistlings from the wind.

A thudding sound broke the quietness of the campus. Axl walked into the campus alone alone, wearing a black jacket and a camouflage safari trousers. His green jungle boots landed heavily on the pavement. He knew that these boots was not suitable for walking on flat, paved ground. These boots were born for travelling across the Alps Mountains. But he didn't have the time to change.

"Hmmm, doesn't look like ETH," Axl murmured as he zipped up his jacket to protect himself from the cold wind.

On weekends the campus was quiet, but today it was way too quiet. Normally students who loved to study would still come to the library and custodians would clean out the fallen leaves and keep the campus clean. But today he could not even see a squirrel jumping among the trees finding nuts for winter.

What Axl didn't notice was that on the top of the three-story auditorium, two people wearing a pure white camouflage jacket held two McMillian Tac-50 rifles in their hands, one male and one female. Their muzzles pointed at Axl's head and chest. Their camouflage blended them into the surrounding building completely; no one could find them easily, especially when someone didn't know what they were looking for.

Axl paced across the central square among the buildings. Normally this stadium-sized open ground would be filled with students, but today no one accompanied Axl except for the cold chairs that were meant for the students to rest. The white physics building stood a few hundred yards in front of him. Through the large open windows on the wall, he could see rolls and rolls of empty seats facing the stage at the front.

"Bonnie and Clyde in position," the two snipers on top of the auditorium whispered to their headsets, one male, one female.

"Lay your eyes on Axl at all times," Valka's command came into their ears through the speakers of their headsets, "Only fire when extreme necessary. I want him alive."

"Roger that," the male sniper responded.

These two snipers of DPA Team Foxtrot were the best sniper squad in DPA. They nicknamed themselves as "Bonnie and Clyde." They had been through more than twenty missions, no missed shots.

As Axl walked up the stairs in front of the glass door of the physics building, two black SUVs stormed into the central square. Their tires screeched on the pavement, leaving black trails on the ground where gray smoke ascended. The two vehicles stopped before the stairs, six men and women wearing black uniforms jumped out from the cars with tranquilizer guns in their hands and pistols with lethal rounds in their holsters.

Ruffnut raised up her gun and launched a tranquilizer dart at Axl. They all knew how over-power Axl could become if he was triggered or really pissed off. They didn't want to face him one to one. The darts in their tranquilizer guns were reengineered, so that they could remove the muscle system of the victim almost right away. The dart with a pink flight flew up the stairs and toward Axl's neck, powered by the great air pressure in the barrel.

Axl pulled out a Beretta pistol from his jacket pocket and tried to squeeze its trigger before the dart could pierce into his neck. But he was still too late.

"Oh fuck," Axl murmured as he watched the dart on his neck with the tip buried into his flesh.

His vision started to dim as if the sky was blocked by a giant blanket. His power drifted away from his body as if someone sucked them away Just a few minutes ago, he could still lift a small car with bare hands, but now his legs couldn't even support his body weight. The light pistol suddenly turned a thousand pounds heavy and the trigger felt like it was glued in place. Other agents fired their tranquilizer guns as they advanced toward Axl, the deep gun firings sounds indicating that more and more darts landed on Axl's body.

His knees slowly bent, the pistol dropped on the stone stairs. After a few more seconds of resisting, he fell unconscious on the ground and rolled down the stairs. The agents watched as their target lay still as a dead body on the ground in silence.

Valka picked up Axl's Beretta and sighed. She couldn't believe Axl just gave up without a manly fight that suit him. He didn't look like a person who would accept court trial. Valka expected another massive gunfight before they could take out him. In the two SUVs were filled by loaded guns and grenades and even rocket launchers. Valka wouldn't be surprised if they had to blow up a building or two.

But Axl just went out without a fight. All the agents standing around Axl were from DPA Team Foxtrot, and they had been chasing Axl for more than half a decade; more than a dozen DPA agents died in his hands.

"Valka, check out the bell tower, at three o'clock!" Bonnie's voice came from Valka's headphone.

Valka turned toward the brown bell tower. In the setting sun, she could only see the faint silhouette of it. The giant bronze bell hung on a thick metal bar at the top of the tower, but the tower wasn't even in the campus. It stood at least two and a half miles away from them. Valka had to use binoculars to see the massive bell clearly.

"I don't see anything. It's too far," Valka replied as she zoomed in toward the tower.

"A person, at the top of the tower!" Bonnie yelled.

Valka raised up the binoculars to get a better view of the tower. Then, a small flash of orange light showed up from behind a small stone statue as if someone quickly turned on and off a flashlight. The crows who rested on the tower flew in the air with horror.

"Sniper!" Valka yelled.

Following her word, she heard the terrifying sound of a bullet punching through the skull of a person next to her mixed with the echoing sound of a sniper rifle firing.

"Anyone hit?" she asked.

"Not one of us," Ruffnut replied in an eerie voice.

"What do you mean…" Valka removed the binoculars from before her eyes and looked around her. The six agents were still standing, but a fresh bullet hole appeared in the middle of Axl's forehead, blood flowed out from behind his head. "What the fuck…"

More and more gun firing came from the roof of the auditorium, Bonnie and Clyde returned fire. Their skills were infallible, but McMillan Tac-50's effective range is around a mile. After a mile, the wind could carry the bullet off course. After emptying their mags, most of the bullets ended up striking the brick tower, breaking down a few pieces of stone, only a few landed on the top of the tower, but completely missed their target.

"Too far!" Clyde yelled. "I need a Barrett."

Ruffnut swung open the door of her SUV and took out the deadly black Barrett M82 and another heavy box ran up the fire escape of the auditorium to deliver the big gun to Clyde.

"But Barrett only has around 2000 yards," Bonnie pointed out.

"That's the one with the longest range we have right now," Clyde replied as Ruffnut set the Barrett beside him.

"We have an even farther weapon," Ruffnut unlocked the box that was one-third of her height.

"What, you have a drone?" Bonnie asked.

"No," Ruffnut said as she took out an FGM-148 Javelin.

"Jesus…" Clyde moved aside from Ruffnut, "You are going to blow up the whole tower. We are in the middle of a city, not in the desert where you can mess around."

"If that shooter is still alive, we are all in danger. You are a sniper, and you should know that that dude is really good," Ruffnut loaded the Javelin. "You try to headshot someone two and a half miles away."

As she pulled the trigger, the missile shot up from the roof of the auditorium and headed toward the top of the bell tower directed by infrared homing, leaving a thin white trail in the air. It took the missile around seven seconds to reach the tower and created a bright red fireball on the top of the tower. The great bronze bell dropped down from the crossbeam and crashed into the building. Stone statues and pieces of concrete fell from the tower, and the explosion shattered the windows. The whole tower shivered under the impact.

* * *

"Laser cooling machine is hot... rubidium is in place...emergency shutdown brake is on, just in case we blow up the whole building again," Emma said as she pointed the four laser guns at the small transparent cube among them. "You are ready to go."

"How long is this going to take?" Hiccup asked.

"Around half an hour," Emma replied. "Laser cooling is something like whipping heat out of the gas until there is almost no heat. And you made this machine in a rush. Turn off the lights, please."

"Why is that?" Hiccup questioned, but still walked to the switch on the wall and turned off the lights.

"Because BEC is so fragile that energy from the light can destroy the condensate."

"How do you know so much about BEC? Right now I feel that my dominance in Muspelheim might be overthrown by an Assistant Engineer," Hiccup laughed into the darkness. He could only see the faint blue lights coming from the laser guns and an ambiguous figure walking around the room.

"Because I studied states of matters," Emma said. "This is what I'm good at, and that's why Gobber assigned me as your Assistant Engineer. He knows that you are good at engineering, but your physics is a bit rusty. The laser cooling machine can make the rubidium reach the designated temperature, and after that we need the Laser to make the atoms inside more powerful… if you know what I'm talking about."

"I know what you are talking about. The Laser doesn't cool down stuff. It only gives the atoms more energy from moving."

"Right, and that makes the Laser extremely dangerous."

"What's that container made of?" Hiccup asked. "Is it non-magnetic?"

"Of course, and the inside is a vacuum."

The laser cooling is a technology that is very effective when studying ultracold molecules. When the laser beam hits the gas molecules will lose kinetic energy. Emma decided to use four laser guns and positioned them around the cub to maximize the cooling effect.

The attack destroyed the laser cooling machine in Asgard, forcing Hiccup and Emma to build a cooling machine. The quadri-cooling machine, which was something like a concoction of four laser guns, took Hiccup 50 hours of hard work and digging through the data in Niflheim for the correct components for the cooling machine.

"Well, hopefully, your laser cooling machine would work," Emma checked the power range of the apparatus. "It's way over the limit, which can decrease the cooling time and reach an even cooler temperature than the original cooling machine of Asgard. But if something goes wrong, the possibility of blowing up the whole Niflheim is pretty high."

Sam moved Hiccup's lab into Niflheim when Asgard was still under reconstruction. Emma was fine with the decision unless the AC is fixed, but Hiccup felt that Niflheim would be a distraction to his work. Mountains of databooks and information stored in Niflheim absorbed his attention from Bose-Einstein Condensate. Most of the time he would be walking among the giant bookshelves and reading the materials that were intriguing to him and not work on Project Bifrost. So Emma ended up talking over a lot of the work.

"Hiccup, how can you still read when the lights are off? I need some help over here," Emma protested.

"I'm not reading, just feeling the books with my fingers," Hiccup's replied.

Emma sighed. After working with Hiccup for three weeks, she already knew that when Hiccup was attracted to something, he would do anything to get it. Project Bifrost was obviously less interesting than the mountains of information in Niflheim to Hiccup.

"Fine, go ahead and feel your books, but you need to start preparing the Laser. I want to finish this thing consecutively."

Hiccup grunted as he walked into Room 108 and started organizing the cords in there. Emma turned on the switch on the cooler and watched as the gas in the glass cube slowly became opaque and turned visible.

"Shut the lights off!" Emma screamed at Room 108, where lights poured out from the opened door. "The lights are damaging the condensate!"

"But I need light to operate the Laser," Hiccup objected. "Use something to cover up the cooling."

After around half an hour of machine humming, Emma darted into Room 108 with the cube covered by a piece of black cloth in her hand.

"I can't believe that you machine actually worked. Right now the condensation is negative 273.139 Celcius," Emma yelled as she placed the cube on the metal plate between the two power lines and removed the cloth.

"Look at this," Hiccup bent down and stared at the cube. "Look at this miracle. Bose-Einstein Condensation. It looks like water in the space. You can even see the combination of particles and molecules."

"C'mon, you know what BEC looks like," Emma connected the ends of the two power lines to the cube and turned the red knob of the controller.

"But it's the fifth state of matter. The first state of matter that can not be found naturally on Earth," Hiccup stood up. "Let's see how much power it has."

As the Laser was charging, bright blue lights ran down the two sides of the two power lines, electrical sparks flashed in the pipes like plasma. When the wave of blue plasma-like substance reached to the ends of the power lines, the cube was lightened by the shaft as if the cube was some sort of bioluminescent creatures. Electrical sparks started to appear within the cube, and each time more sparks exploded in the cube, the brighter the BEC became.

"What the…" Hiccup murmured when the bright blue light almost covered the white light in the room like a lightning bolt.

The cube suddenly shattered with a loud explosion as if a grenade went off in this small room. Pieces of sharp glass flew in the air like darts and cut open Hiccup and Emma's exposed skin. The two power lines still poured out the eerie blue electrical sparks even though the cube was gone.

The sparks charged atoms in the air, sending shivers through Hiccup's body. The hair he breathed in was filled with overly charged nitrogen and oxygen atoms. Emma's long hair slowly raised as static electricity in the room began to build up. Before Hiccup could push the red emergency shutdown button on the wall, the two power lines got overridden by the out of controlled electrical waves and exploded like a sonic bomb, and the blast wave shoved Hiccup and Emma to the ground.

The power lines were the only way to restrain the over-powered electricity, and after they got destroyed, all hell broke free.

Trillions and trillions of electrons combined with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the air, electrical sparks were created right before their eyes as if there was a mini thunderstorm in the room. Hiccup could feel small currents of electricity zapping him every second. The light in the room started flashing and the lightbulb finally exploded when the electrons overcharged the circuits.

"Shut it off!" Emma yelled, kneeling on the ground, a piece of glass punched into her left thigh, blood flowed out from the wound. Her face and arms were covered by ripped skin and blood since the cube exploded two yards from her.

Hiccup reached up for the red button, but the untouchable air seemed to turn into small spikes. Every inch he reached up, he felt like he was crawling through a field filled with cactuses. The button was just a few inches above his fingers, but the electricity in the room disturbed his neuro activities in his brain, causing him to go blackout, images from his memories flashed before his eyes: the beach next to the coast of North Carolina, his father hugging him when he was a little boy, and the time he spent with Fishlegs in the labs.

In Niflheim, no one could help them. Hiccup felt that his head was going to explode. He didn't know what kind of element was causing this weird magnetic field disturbance, but he knew that Sam and Gobber are geniuses.

The wall in which the power lines were connected to shattered into pieces, concrete debris filled the room along with the gray dust. The machine controlling the power lines seemed to be overridden as well. This explosion shook the floor of Niflheim; the blast disconnected the steel door of Room 108 and threw it among the bookshelves outside, knocking down a bookshelf, piles of datasheets and paper flew into the air. Flame escaped from the room as if Room 108 was a fire-breathing dragon, igniting the bookshelves outside.

"SHUT IT DOWN!" Emma shouted before the blast picked her up like wind carrying up a piece of leaf and threw her heavily against the wall.

"Ahhhhhhh!" Hiccup let out a furious scream as he pushed his body up, trying his best to not think about the overwhelming electrons that almost broke his body into pieces.

He slammed his palm on the red emergency shutdown button. The glass protector of the button was already shattered during the explosion. He didn't know what would happen after. If the shutdown device were just going to stop the electrons from escaping, the remaining electrons in the air would still crash his neural system and other organ systems. After he slammed the button, the blue electric sparks within the two broken power lines suddenly turned into brown.

"It's just changing color," Hiccup yelled as he pushed the button again. The remaining pieces of glass protector around the button cut open the skin on his palm, blood drifted down his hand.

"Protons…" Emma replied powerlessly, resting on the ground and leaning against a part of the wall that was still standing. She survived the blast, barely. Blood covered her face and hair, her left arm bent back in an awkward angle, probably the blast broke the bones inside. A piece of concrete ripped open her lab coat and carved a deep cut on her right waist, blood dyed her clothes red. "Not sure how Sam separated electrons, protons, and neutrons from atoms and use them separately. The emergency shutdown is not shutting the Laser down. It releases protons to neutralize the electrons."

Hiccup walked toward the badly beaten controlling panel of the Laser. The heavy metal protector of the controlling panel cracked open during the explosion. The protector was meant to prevent accidental damage to the sensitive controlling devices. Some of the wires were disconnected from the panel, bronze cords exposed in the air. The screen used to show the running conditions of the Laser fractured. But, the three red toggle switches were still connected with the cords and the three green lights above them were flashing, signaling that the switches were still in function.

He flicked the switches one by one from "on" to "off," and the rumbling voice from the Laser finally stopped. The room fell into silence again. Hiccup sighed at the scene. Even with his knowledge, he still couldn't figure out how the Laser worked. It was like a giant scientific but also magical apparatus created by one of the richest and smartest people on earth, who was Sam.

He walked through the broken pieces of the concrete wall and pulled Emma to her feet. "Well, at least we are still alive," Hiccup reassured her. "We can find another way to finish the project."

But Emma stared at the middle of the room, where the glass cube was located. The cube was gone, of course, but the product was, magically, still sitting on the ground.

"The explosion didn't destroy the condensation…" she murmured as she stumbled over to the pile of ooey-gooey, jelly-like substance on the floor. Bose-Einstein Condensate is supposed to be very fragile and can even be destroyed by the energy from lights, and an explosion that even broke down the concrete wall would turn the condensation back to its original gas status. But this time, the condensation sat quietly in the middle of the room, blue lights came from the middle of the transparent material. Light smoke ascended from the material as if it was a pot of boiling water. Hiccup turned around and looked at it. He blinked.

"Is that… charged BEC?" Emma knelt beside the substance that was just the size of her foot even though blood still dripped out from her wounds. "Magical!"

Hiccup picked up a small piece of concrete from the ground and threw it at the BEC. As the concrete touched the BEC, it suddenly turned dark, a thick layer of crystal ice swallowed it within seconds. He walked over to the rock and flicked it. It shattered into small pieces of crystal.

"It froze the rock to a temperature so low that it just turned into pieces when just a small outer force was applied to it!" Hiccup shrieked. "This is the goal of Project Bifrost! The original Bose-Einstein Condensate cannot freeze other things because even though itself is as cold as hel, but its atom speed is so low that it doesn't have the energy to cool down others. But whatever came out from the power lines increased the energy that the BEC can generate without increasing the speed of the atoms themselves."

Emma reached her right index finger toward the condensation, then she quickly withdrew her hand when she touched the light smoke from it. Even the smoke from the condensation gave her frostbite.

"We need to put it in a container that can manage to deal with the extreme temperature!" Emma rose to her feet and darted toward the elevator. "I'm going up to the remaining labs."Then go quick. I feel that this thing is even cooling down the air," Hiccup said as he put on his coat.

* * *

"We did it! We did it!" Emma screamed as she darted out of the elevator and into Sam's office.

His office was still under construction. Engineers removed the completely burnt wall frame and pumped in new concrete. They repainted the floor and the walls and replaced the destroyed furniture with new ones. Sam was an engineer himself, and he actually took this chance to redesign his own office. The windows were still unrepaired, a cool wind blew into the room. When the hardware of Muspelheim needed replacement or reconstruction, the engineers would do the works themselves and never hire people from outside to do the work.

Fortunately, the elevator survived the gunfight. The hardened steel door and frame were covered by small craters created by bullets, but no bullets could punch through the steel. When Emma appeared from the elevator and started shrieking, all the engineers stopped what they were doing at watched the young Assistant Engineer.

"Calm down Emma," Sam dropped his clipboard on a table and looked at her4. He had a few ideas of what Emma was talking about, but he still wanted to hear it. "What did you do?"

"Project Bifrost, it's completed!"

* * *

**To be continued **


	13. Chapter 13

**Hi guys, I'm back again. Thank you for all of your supports and reviews. This story won't be very long, by which I mean it PROBABLY AND MAYBE won't exceed 20 chapters. **

**Warning: this chapter includes some smutty scenes.**

* * *

Chapter 13:

"You know, Hiccup is the best engineer of the entire Muspelheim... and he is also the crush of a lot of young female engineers since not a lot of people can not resist his messy auburn hair and those eyes," Fishlegs chuckled into the darkness. His hands were restrained behind the iron pole perpendicular to the floor and extended up to the ceiling. Light beams landed on the cold, concrete floor through the small, rectangular windows on top of the wall of the basement, providing the minimum illumination so that they would not freak out in total darkness.

"Well, according to the three-hour lecture of your buddy Hiccup, I'm pretty sure my friend Astrid is in good hands," Heather, two yards next to him, replied half-heartedly. Nina stripped her jacket and blouse, only leaving her with her bra and her black trousers. Her wrists and ankles were restrained to a metal chair that connected to the floor with white zip ties, and the four legs of the chair were embedded into the floor, preventing her to move around with the chair. Nina completely disheveled Heather's long dark hair into something similar to a bird's nest while tormenting her.

"Gods I just realized that after all these days I still don't know your name. I just know that you are a close friend of Hiccup who is also an engineer at Muspelheim," Heather leaned back her neck, not believing the truth. Since they had been kidnapped, Heather had been referring Fishlengs as " the guy" or "hey you!"

"Fishlegs Ingerman," Fishlegs replied, looking at the figure next to him. In the morning, he could only see a dark figure, but when the sun began to set, and the thin light beam through the windows landed perfectly on Heather like a flashlight, he could see the face of the brunette and her battered body. "Not a lot of people know of me anyway; in Muspelheim people always turn their attention toward Hiccup and ignoring his Assistant Engineer who made his fame and glory possible."

Fishlegs turned his head and stared at her. Even though countless indelible scars and wounds located across her body, but he could still see that her skin used to be as smooth as marble. Her thin waist was only one third the width of Fishlegs', and brick-like muscles covered her abdomen.

As she threw back her head, her neck was like those of the beautiful swans. He suddenly wanted to feel the collarbones of hers, to touch the skin of hers and map those scars with his fingers. Her dark brown hair spread along her shoulder like a brown cascade and her eyes were as green as Hiccup's, but they looked more like pearls.

He never expected to meet with a girl after being kidnapped from his new laboratory in Plymouth. He thought that the kidnappers were after his knowledge in nuclear engineering, but till now they had done nothing to him except feeding him twice a day. In the past few days, he had been doing only two things: repeating the knowledge he had in his brain and watching Heather.

"Enjoying the view there?" Heather asked, looking at the oversized blond boy.

"Uhh... I mean…" Fishlegs quickly turned his head away as he began to blush.

"It's fine," Heather smirked at Fishlegs' reaction. " A lot of the young boys at DPA have their eyes on me...gods I don't know why there are suddenly so many 17-year-olds and 18-year-olds at DPA...and that dude named Clever, too. He already got Ashley and not sure why he wants me as well."

"Is Astrid famous in DPA as well?" Fishlegs asked.

"She is like the queen of our team, and every day boys surround her and want her to like them," Heather looked at the window of the basement and tried to take a peek of the world outside. "But of course she doesn't even look at them. Why do you ask?"

"To see if Hiccup has to fight someone for Astrid. Hiccup is my friend, and he told me before how happy he can get when Astrid is with him."

"Don't worry about Hiccup. Astrid uses Hiccup's picture background of her phone and she can't stop talking about how much she misses Hiccup. I'm sure they will be a 'and they lived happily ever after'," Heather turned her head and looked at Fishlegs. "You care about him a lot, right?"

"Of course!" Fishlegs snapped. "I would give everything for him to live a life that he wants. When he was unpopular, I wasn't popular; and now he is famous in Muspelheim, and I would rather be the person who supports him in the background. I get nothing out of working my ass off while helping him except for strong friendship, and a strong friendship is what I want."

"Wow…that's really… you don't have friends?"

"Not really. In school, I had always been the kid who sits in the corner by himself. People didn't like me or hate me since they had never noticed me until the end of the school year when my grade was the highest in the school."

"Victors are always lonely," Heather murmured.

"Maybe. When I graduated from college and came to Muspelheim, I thought that I would still be the number one, but I quickly realized that I was wrong. Muspelheim is a place filled with all the number ones in the world, like Hiccup," Fishlegs told his story to Heather, and Heather, even though freezing and shivering since Nina stripped away her clothes, still listened attentively. "A senior engineer challenged me in electrical engineering during my first day there, and he defeated me easily. Then the following weeks they dug out my personal information from Muspelheim's database and humiliated me because I was the first in my college engineering class but ended up as the last in Muspelheim."

"Doesn't sound like something should happen in one of the most advanced laboratories in the world."

"I know. That doesn't happen a lot to new arrivals, but they did that anyway probably because I looked like a runt at that time and couldn't defend myself. Hiccup had already got his fame back then, and he saw the talents within me, so he chose me as his Assistant Engineer. He is a nice guy, you know. Other engineers believed that Hiccup would waste a lot of his precious time on an idiot like me, but he never listened to them," Fishlegs tried to scratch his head but realized that his wrists were restrained. "And that's how our friendship started, and he strongly disagreed with our bose transferring me to England to start a new branch."

"And Hiccup told you about his life stories as well, right?" Heather asked.

"Yeah, everything. Most of the time was about Astrid and his childhood," Fishlegs replied, looking unsurprised.

Meanwhile, one floor above them, the members of Heimdall sat around on the giant fluffy couch, sharing jokes while cleaning the weapons that were laid out on the wooden tea table in front of them. The sound of them laughing filled the room along with the sounds of metal clinking and pressing bullets into the mags.

Eric Fredric, the sponsor of Heimdall, owned this house and provided it to them as a temporary safe house. Since they arrived here two weeks ago, he hadn't shown up to greet them yet because he was also a politician and a businessman.

The giant living room was as large as a basketball field, at least half a dozen chandeliers suspended from the ceiling lit the space. The space that was meant for a TV was replaced by a twelve-foot wide projector screen. The floor was made of marble, shined under the lights like flashlights. Three sofas as large as a queen-sized bed with multiple pillows surrounding the wooden tea table that was covered by arms. Each of them took a sofa so that they had enough room for their weapon maintenance. A fireplace stood at one side of the wall, and a metal poker leaned on the base of the fireplace. Three wooden armoires were placed next to the projector screen. Behind their doors were roles after rolls of weapons and ammo. Through the two glass patio doors was a deck with a table and a few chairs.

"What do we do next? I hope this mission can be over soon since it has been the most boring one in the history of mercenary," Evan commented as he cleaned the blades of his wire cutter with a wet towel. "I mean, a college professor paid us a lot of money just to destroy some weird private laboratory? For what?"

As the only person in Heimdall who hadn't mastered using basic arms, Evan was the field engineer of this team. He could disarm all the existing bombs in this world besides nukes. His weapon was the black tool kit resting next to him, filled with screwdrivers, all sorts of wrenches, batteries, and vices. A laptop with sky blue protection case was charging next to the wall, another Evan's weapon since he mastered cyber defense and offense.

"Because Davis the Alchemist doesn't want to see others succeed," Nina replied. On the table before her, laid a small pile of golden shiny bullets and a stack of black magazines; she picked up the rounds and pressed them into the mags. She made sure to load two rounds less than the full capacity of the mags so that the springs in them wouldn't be worn out so quickly. She was only dressed in a baby blue camisole that exposed her navel and a pair of black, tight shorts with a high-cut, making it very similar to an over-sized bikini bottom.

. When the members of Heimdall were together, they had no fear toward each other since they were just like family to each other. If Evan didn't insist, Nina would wear nothing but underwear. Evan, on the other hand, buried himself in a heavy duffle coat since Nina turned the AC to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

"And who on earth is Davis the Alchemist? What's his real name?"

"Davis the Alchemist is the nickname of a physics professor at Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich. I'm not so sure about his real name, only Axl knows," David plopped on the red, bed-sized sofa like someone who just came back from heavy training. His heavy body sunk into the cover of the sofa like pressing a finger into a piece of sponge. He wore a thin, gray fleece jacket and dark blue cargo pants, "but is an extremely rich scientist who has an ego larger than anyone else on Earth. He secretly hires people like us to disrupt other scientists and even directly attack governmental infrastructures if needed so that he can be the number one and gets all the attention."

"And Muspelheim is in his way toward success?" Evan asked.

"I don't know, but it seems like it," David said. "We are just people who fight to survive. We have our reasons to become the people we are right now. After the moment when we started being as a mercenary, there is no turning back. We can not go back to our lives before. This is a one-way trip; we start the journey, and the journey never stops before we die."

"Albert died, and his journey ended at the coast of the Persian Gulf. I remembered that he wanted to visit his girlfriend after we came back from Saudi," Nina grunted. "We are all going to die, and the only difference is how we die."

"To this world, we are rats from the gutter who should be forever hunted and shoot on sight. They don't understand why someone becomes a mercenary when they are not one," David addressed. "I chose to be one because I was searching for challenges and opportunities to be freed from the rules."

"That doesn't make sense. We have our own rules. No one is freed from the rules," Evan snorted. "It makes more sense if you say 'Nina flirted with me the first time we met'."

"Shut up, Evan," David snapped and turned his head toward the opposite direction.

"Ohhh I think he is blushing!" Evan laughed.

"Really?" Nina rested the mag in her hand on the table, walked over to David and sat beside him. "Tell me, sweetie, is what Evan said correct?"

"I'm going to kill you, Evan," David rubbed his face and sat up from the sofa and trying to get away from this awkward position, but only to see Nina watching him just a few inches in front of him with her dark but shiny eyes. She winked at him, combing her dark red hair to one side as if she was trying to tease him.

He stared at Nina, and her big eyes looked at him with a mixture of if-you-don't-tell-me-I'll-kill-you and the desire to jump on him. David quickly gave up, "Fine fine fine, Evan was right."

"Why me?" Nina pursued, moving her body closer to David, "You can attract a handful of women with your handsomeness… I'm serious this time… I mean just look at those ocean blue eyes and short blond hair of yours. I bet Evan has a feeling toward you."

"Screw you!" Evan objected loudly, "I'm not a homo!"

"But you can let other women like me fall for you," Nina ignored Evan and continued seducing David, resting her right hand on his chest and pushed David back to the sofa with a powerful and almost violent shove. She jumped onto the sofa, straddling on his hip.

"Holy… you triggered her! What she said was just bullshit..." Evan watched intriguingly as Nina pinned David on the couch," You know what would happen if you get Nina to do that. You won't hold for more than ten minutes."

"No shit," David replied, watching the girl above him.

They all knew that Nina had a problem with controlling herself from sexual hunger and exhilaration. She had this amazing skill of making love for a thousand times without tiring, and the most confusing part was she had this insatiable want toward sex, and she was like how Eos acted after Aphrodite cursed her.

Axl quickly realized this problem a few days after recruiting her, when she climbed up to him while he was trying to take a nap. He tried to fix her problem by asking multiple neurologists and psychologists, and he even tried to use medicine to limit the amount of adrenaline and dopamine in her body to decrease her crazy thoughts of riding someone 24/7. Axl knew that he had to treat her mental disorder otherwise she would crash Heimdall just by laying all the other members and turn the team into something...unimaginable.

After two years of medical treatment, nothing had changed besides Axl spending thousands of dollars on medicines while she fucked a few doctors during treatments. Realizing that they could do nothing to change Nina, they had to manage to live with it and got used to the lifestyle of intense gunfighting during daytime and dealing with the insatiable Nina at night.

"Ok Nina, let's get this straight," David said as he tried to sit up and push her away, "I know all four of us have been living together like a family for years, but this time you are going way too fast and too far. You better…"

Nina was way stronger than David. She easily pushed him back to the soft sofa by pressing his shoulder into the sofa and covered his mouth with her left hand. She smirked at the man as she began to unzip his fleece jacket with her right hand. David tried to say something else, but only to be muffled by her hand.

He didn't object physically, like pushing her away or something, as if he was waiting for Nina to fuck him.

"If you quiet down I can make this quick," Nina lowered her head next to his and whispered into his ear.

"Hmm...Mmmm!"

"Sorry," Nina said as she uncovered David's mouth, "What did you say?"

"I said take your time," David smiled back at her, giving her permission, "And, try to make a differ…"

Nina crashed down onto him and covered his mouth fiercely with hers before he could finish his sentence. Her body flattened on his, and her tongue slipped into his mouth like a snake with absolutely no hesitation. He fought a dirty tongue war with her, and when each time David's tongue swept across her lips, she would moan into his mouth obscenely. She worked loose his jacket and removed it from him. As her hand tried to grab the hem of his t-shirt beneath, her fingers landed right on the muscles on his abdomen. Her eyes widened with surprise, then turned into joy. His fingers got hold of the hem of her blue camisole and yanked it over her head and tossed it carelessly on the ground.

"Gosh, you are getting fiercer and fiercer every day…" David whispered to her. His fingers trailed down to the waistband of her shorts and tugged it gently. Nina shivered and moaned into David's mouth as his nails scratched across her skin behind her shorts.

"Shut it and focus on your work…" Nina shut him up by pressing her mouth on his.

David's brain almost burned after seeing that Nina also wore nothing beneath her camisole. She pressed herself against David and whimpered against his lips as if they were glued together. He could feel her breasts began to swell and heat from her submerged him. David pulled her to his side and in one smooth motion, he positioned himself on top of her like a tiger pressing a deer down to the ground. His mouth trailed down her jaw and licked her throat, sending shivers through her body. She sobbed loudly, burying her nailed into the skin on his back.

Nina didn't let David get her slowly. She loosened his pants and pulled it down to his knees in one fluent motion. David tried to gain dominance but ended up being restrained by Nina's muscular arms.

Evan watched as David slowly turned Nina into a trembling, moaning, and wanting mess. They were used to "treat" Nina whenever she wanted since they didn't think that having a woman in their team who wanted to lay them every night was a bad thing. Evan experienced the same just a week ago. He continued sharpening the blades on his wire cutter and lubricating his electric drill while his other two teammates were riding each other home just a few feet before him.

"Do you want me to close the curtains or something?" Evan said. The loud moanings and whinings from both David and Nina's mouth almost covered Evan's voice, "Because this living room is designed to have a nice view of the street in front of us, which means that people outside can have a nice view of the inside as well."

"Stop...fucking...interrupting…" Nina's voice quavered. Then she almost yelped when David pressed her right nipple into his mouth. She arched her body up to feel more of David's teeth and tongue.

"Alright," Evan shrugged as he turned his attention back to his tool kit again.

A few minutes later, the sound of someone unlocking the front door came into Evan's ears. He tossed the wrench onto the sofa and took out a Glock 19 that was hidden beneath a pillow next to him and pointed it at the door.

"Welcome back… holy moly!" someone with heavy French accent shrieked as he stepped into the house, "Is this the way you are going to greet the person who gives millions of dollars to you for free?"

"Sorry, Eric," Evan lowered his Glock and put it back under the pillow, "I thought you were still traveling cross-world to attend all of those rich people parties. Sorry about the gun."

"The gun thing is fine, Evan. I know you guys are always on your nerves. I mean those two…" Eric pointed at the two naked bodies on the sofa as Nina gasped into David's mouth as he pushed himself further into her.

Eric Fredric was a politician who worked with the UN to help the people around the world who needed food and medical aid. He donated millions of dollars to try to save more people from hunger and disease. He was also a billionaire whose family secretly controlled three large banks around the world and his own airplane engine company was a manufacturer of engines for more than twenty different airlines. He had enough wealth to buy all the houses in Asheville, and this three-story house with a swimming pool and basketball field was just a small shed compared to the mansion that he lived in. He financially supported multiple presidential candidates and was one of the most powerful politicians in this world. He knew how to control people's thoughts with his amazing speech skills as powerful and energetic as Churchill's speeches during the Second World War. He was only in his thirties, a fairly young age for a person who controlled so much wealth and power.

But under the skin of humanist and politician, he was the sponsor, or patron, of Heimdall, the most wanted mercenary organization in the world. Axl used the money that Eric gave him to buy weapons, clothes, and food. A lot of the times when the authority was about to capture one of the members of Heimdall, Eric would step out and disrupt the authority forces by bribing or simply threaten them with his divine political power.

His eyes were dark brown like milk chocolates. His short, black hair looked as pointed as a warthog's spikes. He wore a formal white shirt with the hem tucked into his black trousers and a tie with golden stripes hanging on his neck. His black dressing shoes were as shiny as those newly polished marbles.

"You know what Nina is like," Evan said, "you are lucky that you don't have to deal with her."

"Oh, I thought you guys enjoy it."

"In the beginning, yes, but as time goes on, it gets a bit boring," Evan sighed, "When will Axl be back?"

"In about three days. He needs to talk with Davis the Alchemist."

o0o

"What on earth are they doing up there?" Fishlegs asked as the rhythmic sound similar to someone jumping on a trampoline traveled through the wooden door of the staircase which connected to the house and into his ears, "And why am I hearing people sobbing?"

"No...they are not…this… this is so messed up," Heather murmured. In some ways, DPA and Heimdall were the same types of organizations, and the only difference between them was their purpose. They also shared the same hidden and unwritten rules of war at peacetime.

And she knew that fucking a person who fought shoulder-by-shoulder with you was not a good choice when all the intelligence agencies across the world were hunting you down.

But she didn't know that Evan, David, and Axl were already used to this.

"I need flamethrowers ready just in case we can't control the… advanced BEC," Sam ordered as he put on his white lab coat and entered the elevator with Emma. Then he took down his radio on his belt and pressed down the call button, "Gobber, you start preparing a container that can restrain this. If what Hiccup and Emma had created was what our client wanted, then that can be destructive. I need something that is non-magnetic, can withstand ultra-vacuum, with extremely stable molecular structure, and Van der Waal gap less than point five angstrom."

"I'll try my best, but most of our labs are not repaired yet," Gobber's voice came in with the sound of metal saw in the background.

The elevator almost plummeted down toward Niflheim. Emma and Sam stood in the elevator. Sam was holding a small laboratory flamethrower in hand. This was a revision of those flamethrowers that the military used. This version's igniter was more controllable and very helpful during intricate scientific experiments that needed precision. The two small fuel tanks each the size of a 60 oz water bottle were buckled onto his waist and connected to the back of the trigger. It looked like an overpowered Bunsen burner being used sideways.

"So you said that the Laser exploded during cooling and you shut it down?" Sam asked. Sweat started forming on his forehead, because of both excitement and fear. He was excited because they had overcome something that Muspelheim struggled with for years. Since Hogan Von VischKwades started Project Bifrost, this had always been shown as "incomplete and failed" on the document. Which, to Sam and all engineers of Muspelheim, was an embarrassment.

He was also afraid because using Bose-Einstein Condensate as a weapon was a completely new concept. No one in this world had ever done that. Sam knew the consequences of developing an over-power weapon before a complete understanding of it.

"Yes, and we don't know how that thing got created. It was like magic!" Emma replied elatedly, "I'm not sure if I and Hiccup can do that again since this time was just lucky that the electrons in the Laser didn't kill us before we shut it down."

"Yeah, I should've provided you with some basic information about the Laser."

As the steel doors of the elevator slid open, a wave of air as freezing as those on Antarctica stormed into the elevator. Emma could even see the thin, white gas floating in the air.

"What the hell…" Sam murmured as he zipped up his lab coat and raised his flamethrower before him.

Both Emma and Sam hesitated before they stepped out of the elevator. Each time when they breathed in the cold air, they felt as if their lungs were freezing. Sam wanted to turn on the flamethrower and heat this area, but he was afraid to ignite his precious documents. If he accidentally burned down Niflheim, everything that his family, the Timothy family, had been working for would be ruined.

"What took you so long? I'm turning into human-sized ice cream right now!" Hiccup's furious voice came from Room 107. "I think this BEC is going to freeze everything if we don't stop it!"

Hiccup's cry convinced Emma and Sam to enter Niflheim that was more like a fridge by now. They ran down the dim corridor toward Room 107. As they got closer to Room 107, the temperature became lower. Since they were just wearing a thin lab coat, goosebumps appeared on their skin because of the chilly air and their breaths were visible. The voice of their footsteps bounced around the walls of Niflheim and echoed across the gigantic space.

Frost started to form on the metal frames of the shelves. Even though the ventilation machine pumped fresh, warm air from the ground down to Niflheim, but it couldn't control the decreasing temperature.

The debris from the explosion hadn't been cleaned yet. The gray dust and pieces of the concrete wall and wood fillings on the ground crackled as Emma and Sam's boots landed on them. The wooden door of Room 107 laid lopsidedly against the corridor's wall. In Room 107, Hiccup sat in the corner, back against the wall. He was trying to make fire by drilling a small piece of wood that came off from the door. His body was shaking because of coldness and his cheeks turned bright red. His breath looked like white smoke coming out from his mouth as if he was smoking.

"Why don't you come out?" Emma said to him.

"Because I want to watch the condensation," Hiccup stared at the middle of the room.

"Oh my…" Sam almost shrieked as he saw the translucent, jelly-like, rubbery substance lying on the floor. A dim, blue light formed in the middle of it as if it was one of those bioluminescent jellyfish. "Is this what I think it is?"

"This is it, sir. At least I think," Hiccup reported in a quivering voice, crossing his arms and tried to keep himself warm. "Sorry, we ruined the Laser."

"The Laser is not your concern. Get on your feet and we need to find a way to control that thing before it freezes all of us," Sam pointed the flamethrower at the condensation.

"You know that there is a possibility of you destroying the condensation, right?" Hiccup pushed himself up from the ground.

"I know, but I also want to test how strong this thing can get after being… well… upgraded," Sam said as he squeezed the trigger.

Orange flame shot out from the igniter like a dragon breathing fire. The igniter only had a diameter of four centimeters, but the shaft of the flame turned out into as thick as those stone columns standing in front of the Temple of Artemis. The flame close to the igniter was purple instead of the normal bright orange color.

Burning fuel dripped down from the tip of the flamethrower, creating dark spots on the gray concrete ground. The hot wind blasted their faces as if they were standing right in front of a gigantic forge. The concrete dust and remaining parts of the Laser turned bright red the instant the flame touched them. The wall facing the flamethrower was charred badly as if someone painted the wall with black paint. As the flame touched the opposite wall, it bounced back and almost burnt the trio.

Everything on the ground was swallowed by the raging fire. Black, dense smoke rose up from the pond of blaze and quickly covered the ceiling of the room. The temperature increased rapidly from the temperature inside a fridge to somewhere inside a sauna.

"Shit! Who engineered this thing?" Sam shrieked as he released the trigger of the flamethrower, "I thought this was supposed to be a laboratory version flamethrower, not a portable flame tank!"

The floor looked as if a wave of lava had just flowed pass. The metal frame of the Laser turned as red as a cooked lobster and the wires and cords inside were completely melted. But, the ooey-gooey Bose-Einstein Condensation that sat in the middle of the room remained as it was, pale blue light glimmering inside of the translucent, rubbery outer membrane.

"Unbelievable!" Emma yelled as the smoke scattered and revealed the unchanged condensation, "It endured the direct attack of a flamethrower!"

After the flamethrower stopped bursting out fire, the warm temperature started dropping slowly. The blue light formed inside the BEC grew brighter as the temperature dropped more. Hiccup stepped cautiously to the condensation and bent down to try to touch it.

"Wait!" Sam said in a sharp tone and raised his hand as if Hiccup was going to touch a bomb. "Do not touch it."

Hiccup stopped. He looked back at Sam, and then he turned to the BEC. He stepped away. He could also sense something eerie and unexplainable about the BEC. Not just that it survived the flamethrower, but it seemed like having the ability to suck the warmth out of the environment. The room fell silent, only the crackling sound of the still-burning outer case of the Laser could be heard. Emma looked at Sam, Sam stared at the BEC as if it was a bomb that was about to go off, and Hiccup was in a dilemma of deciding whether touching it would be a good idea.

"I can even smell the power within it," Sam's voice became as deep as the bells in an ancient tower.

"What power?" Emma asked.

"The power to destroy things," Sam explained. "From what I know about Bose-Einstein Condensation and what I saw, the molecule formation is nothing close to what we had predicted. I believe that the atoms are both moving at the speed of light as well as not moving at all."

"That doesn't make any sense. How do you move and not move?"

"That's the part that confuses me," Sam holstered the flamethrower and put his hands on his hips, "I read through Hogan Von VischKwades and his research team's manuscripts, and I discovered that they seemed to come close to something big and too advanced that people back then, even Muspelheim, didn't have the right technology to keep researching."

"What does the Laser do?" Hiccup growled suddenly. His vision landed on the broken outer cases of the Laser, "We tried to figure out how the Laser works, but it got destroyed before we could do some deeper investigations."

"To be honest, Hiccup," Sam shrugged. "I don't know either. My father received this from one of his scientist friends. I believe that dude's name is Davis Alchensentrik, a genius Swiss physicist who teaches at the Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich."

"ETH Zurich?" Hiccup acclaimed, "I heard the news about a shooting incident near their physics building or something."

* * *

**To be continued**


	14. Chapter 14

**Welcome back guys. First of all, hopefully everyone had a mice Christmas, and here I wish everyone will enjoy the beginning of a new decade. **

**Sorry that it has been a long while since my previous updates. You know, finals and stuff. Now I'll try to make the updates faster. **

* * *

Chapter 14:

Police cars and fire trucks surrounded the debris of the ancient bell tower. The lights on their roofs let Valka felt that she was looking straight at a dozen flashlights. When the tower was constructed, engineers were still using stones and bricks. Even though only the upper part of the tower fell apart under the explosion of the Javelin anti-tank missile, pieces of stone still constantly rolled down from the remaining parts of the tower. Pieces of the giant bronze bell that used to stand at the top of the tower laid on the ground. The hundred-year-old bell didn't survive the impact as it fell from the tower and shattered into thousands of pieces of shining metal resting in the middle of Zurich.

"No pedestrians were killed, but around three dozen people were injured due to fallen debris," a police officer reported to Valka.

The Zurich police surrounded the area with yellow barricade tape where rocks as big as an adult fell from around twenty stories high. If one of those rocks landed on a human, he would be smashed into pieces. The ground was covered by a thin layer of brown dirt mixed with small, sharp pieces of rock.

"Any signs of weapons?" Valka asked. "Or dead bodies are hidden inside the remaining of the tower?"

"No, we searched this area three times, and there are no signs of death or weapons," the officer replied as the radio buckled on his vest started crackling.

"That guy must be in the tower when the tower went down," Ruffnut walked over to Valka. "It took the Javelin a few seconds to hit the tower, and he probably was killed during the explosion. If not, the tower went down less than a minute later, and he didn't have time to come down from the top of the tower in a minute."

The officer didn't reply. He walked away, holding his radio up to his mouth and was saying something.

The street was barricaded by police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks. Paramedics were treating the pedestrians who were wounded when the tower crashed down. A helicopter hovered above the area, searching for more possible attacks. The police received orders to not let anyone enter the area, but after Valka and Ruffnut showing their DPA badges, the officers backed down.

After confirming that Axl McDowell was killed, even though Valka didn't know who killed him and why, she sent the rest of Team Foxtrot back to the States, and only leaving her and Ruffnut at Zurich.

"Any contacts with Heather?" Valka asked as she and Ruffnut walked through piles of ancient bricks of the tower.

"No," Ruffnut replied, looking at the smoke ascended from the remaining five floors of the tower, "The team will arrive at Charleston in three hours… anyway, I think Astrid is having a fun time. I doubt she even knows that Heather is supposed to keep an eye on her."

"You believed it?" Valka replied surprisingly.

"Believe what?"

"I left Heather at Asheville just to keep an eye on Astrid and you believed that?"

"Of course?" Ruffnut said carefully, surprised by her team leader's question. "Why would I doubt your orders? You are the team leader."

"Ok… well Heather is supposed to keep an eye on Astrid, but that is just part of her job."

"What!?"

"She is also acting as a GPS for us to find things."

"Find what?"

"The safehouse of Heimdall."

"How is she going to know where the safe house is supposed to be? I mean a safehouse is supposed to not be safe for Heimdall," Ruffnut argued. "Besides, that's Heimdall's safe house. Of course, they'll make it hard to find. Otherwise, how can they survive chasing by authorities for more than a decade."

"She doesn't, and I don't expect her to find it," Valka shrugged carelessly. "But it'll find her."

* * *

The clanking sound of metals gently colliding into each other filled Niflheim as a small robot vehicle as big as a dictionary traveled down the corridor. It looked similar to one of those NASA's Martian rovers with mechanical arms to grab stuff up from the ground. The two cameras above its two front wheels worked as its eyes and transferred the image back to the control panel.

Its operators were sitting inside the small elevator with three layers of coats and hot coffee. They squeezed against each other to warm each other like a small group of penguins in the middle of a storm. Even though the heavy, explosion-proof doors of the elevator could trap some heat, Hiccup, Emma, and Sam still felt like they were inside an igloo. After Sam's flamethrower went out of fuel, the temperature inside Niflheim started to drop as if someone stuffed tones and tones of ice into the walls. The BEC could magically cool down almost every molecule around it, and that turned Niflheim into a freezer. The gray, concrete walls were covered by white frost, the lights here were not designed to endure low temperature and the glass lids started to shatter one by one.

The BEC sitting in the middle of Room 108 seemed to suck in all the heat in Niflheim, and the screen of the electronic thermometer on the wall had stopped working because of cold temperature.

Most of the facilities in Niflheim were designed to withstand high temperatures since its closer to the core of Earth and ventilation through a 250-meter long pipe might not work all the time. Sam and the engineers didn't think about Niflheim being under extreme low temperature. Even if the AC stopped working, the heat from Earth should at least keep it at around 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The BEC was no bigger than Hiccup's head, and in front of Niflheim, the BEC looked more like an ant climbing into a football stadium. Usually to keep Niflheim at a cozy temperature that would not destroy some of the fragile, hundred-years-old documents needed more than forty ventilation pipes and ACs.

"Damned Bose-Einstein Condensation," Sam cursed as he rubbed his palms together. He was wearing a heavy, yellow woolen jacket that scientists at Antarctica would wear and a brown, fuzzy hat. His cheek turned bright red and his breath immediately turned into visible white smoke as he parted his mouth.

Hiccup and Emma were wearing similar clothes. After finding out that the flamethrower would not stop the BEC from cooling down this space, the trio scrambled into the elevator, ascended back to Sam's office, grabbed all the winter clothes they could find, and took out an old, research robot that could help them transport the BEC.

"What the hell is wrong with you guys?" A few minutes ago, Gobber asked loudly as Sam, Hiccup, and Emma darted out of the elevator and scrambled to look for coats and jackets. He walked over to Sam and handed the small cube to him, "The container that you asked for. Damn luck was on my side and I got the formula right at the first try."

"If we don't find a way to stop that little Einstein-evil, we need to get ready to face something like the movie 'The Day After Tomorrow'," Sam replied in a heavy tone as he held the translucent cube in his hand. "Is this it?"

"Yep, the cube is made of artificially re-engineered glass. It's dense enough to stop any known atoms and particles from passing through, and its non-magnetic, could endure the temperature from 3000 to -230 degrees Celsius. The lid can seal the container after putting things in there," Gobber said, confused by Sam, Hiccup, and Emma's anxious and almost horrified faces, "Are you sure everything is alright down there?"

"Let all engineers specialized in physics and weaponry start working on a… something that can hold and fire BEC," Sam patted Gobber's shoulder, "Project Bifrost is almost completed. Now we just need a weapon to fire it."

Hiccup took the robot with him since he correctly foresaw that when they got back to Niflheim, no one would be willing to walk into that over-sized freezer and pick up the BEC.

* * *

"What the fuck," Gobber said as the screen of his computer screen showed the properties of the BEC in that cube. "Atomic speed is way out of control but it's still… cold."

"Watch your language, Gobber," Sam warned.

"Right," Gobber murmured as he handed the cube back to Hiccup. "The tough time is over Hiccup. Now you just need something to fire it."

Hiccup held the cube carefully with two hands. He was still afraid that if he dropped it, the cube would crack and they would all freeze to death. "Ok then, do you have a lot of materials that made this cube?"

"I can let another research group make some," Gobber shrugged.

"Then I think we can come up with an experimental version in like… five days?" Emma looked at her Lead Engineer.

"Sure," Hiccup agreed.

"Tell me when you are going to test it," Sam said abruptly before Hiccup and Emma left Gobber's office.

"What? You want to be there?" Gobber replied before Hiccup.

"No, because you are going to Charleston AFB to test it," Sam replied.

"Wait, do you mean Charleston Air Force Base?" Emma exclaimed. "That's a military base."

"It can keep the Project safe. I have a few friends there that can provide you with a testing field under the US military protection."

"I think with Hic's girlfriend he is safe anywhere," Gobber joked.

"Not funny, Gobber," Hiccup rolled his eyes. Then he turned to Sam: "We have our guards. Why bother asking for others?"

"I don't think that the previous attack was an independent mission. They want something from Muspelheim, and after the attack, we lost around twenty guards," Sam explained. "I have to make sure that nothing else from Muspelheim gets affected."

While Hiccup and Emma were turning their lab inside out to find the right combination of weaponry to create a suitable way to launch the BEC without hurting the user, Astrid was at the front door of Asgard chatting with the remaining guards of Muspelheim. The outside walls of the building were still covered by bullet holes and there were still some bloodstains in the small parking lot. The guards got rid of the cars that were completely busted during the attack, and that included Hiccup's Ford.

"Still worried about your boy?" a guard named Fredrick teased Astrid. He had an SRM 1216 shotgun behind his back.

"Of course," Astrid replied. She wasn't really into chatting with strangers. But, seeing other people also dealing with firearms each day gave her the feeling of closeness, just like two veterans from war would suddenly be attracted to each other.

"You know about Heimdall?" Astrid asked the guards.

"Sure, the most wanted mercenaries in the world," another guard named Harrison replied. "Everyone dealing with weapons should know about them."

"I'm sure they are the one behind the previous raid," Astrid concluded without hiding.

The guards looked at each other.

"How do you know?" one asked.

"Because I'm one of the agents who are chasing them for years," Astrid said. "I can even smell them."

"Then what are you doing here?" Fredrick laughed. "You should be out there finding those people."

"I'm here because of Hiccup, ok?" Astrid growled. "I need to make sure that my family is safe."

"Ohhh, so now he is not just a boyfriend," another guard joked.

"Well…" Astrid thought about it. Then she realized that she had stepped into a trap. "Keep your mouth shut!"

The guards and Astrid all laughed. Valka had kept Astrid out of operations for a while, and that made Astrid pretty frustrated even though she could spend more time with Hiccup. Now when she was with people with similar careers, she felt she was back in a big family again. The guards were also happy to have another person talking to them and joking with them. After the raid the guards' were over-stressed. Now half of the guards needed to do the work that was meant for all the guards. They didn't know when the raid would come again, so they had to keep alarmed at all times. When Astrid showed up, they finally had a chance to relax a bit, since she was capable of facing all the guards on her own.

After another hour of casual talking in front of the front door of Asgard, Hiccup pushed the glass door open and walked into the falling sunlight. He had a heavy gray bag in his right hand, which was filled with research papers about Project Bifrost. He had already changed from the old-fashioned white lab coat into a casual hoodie and jeans. Before he could take a breath of the fresh air outside, he felt a blonde jumping onto him.

"Hey babe, you finished early today," Astrid asked innocently while looking at Hiccup with winking eyes.

"Is this supposed to be the beginning of something?" Hiccup replied as he tried to push Astrid away since she was 150 pounds of fight machine and Hiccup was just a skinny engineer.

"Of course," Astrid chuckled. "You finishing early gives me more time to do what I want to do to you."

"Oh yeah, I want to see how a government agent can perform in bed," Hiccup smirked at her. "If that's what is in your mind right now."

After his Ford was wasted during the raid, Hiccup was using one of Emma's cars before he could get another one. Emma just tossed him the key of a Cadillac when Hiccup was asking around to borrow a car for a few days. Hiccup suspected that Emma, or her parents, were some super-rich businessmen since she always had two cars parked next to Asgard, and after the raid, two more showed up from nowhere to replace the old two.

Astrid didn't have a car since she didn't need one. Most of the time she was riding in an SUV or Chevrolet with bullet-proof windows and doors that belonged to DPA.

The guards all watched as Hiccup and Astrid walked toward the bright gray Cadillac resting next to a wall that still had the scratches from a few bullets.

"Here comes the lust, again," Fredrick said to the other guards as they watched the Cadillac disappeared down the Road.

"What, he is gone?" Emma darted out of the front door right after the red tail lights of the Cadillac blended into the trees.

"Sorry," Harrison smiled as he exchanged a look with his colleagues. "I think Mr. Haddock has an appointment right now."

"Well that shouldn't change the fact that he never stops working before 10 pm," Emma insisted.

"Not when the appointment was with Astrid," a guard shrugged. "It's not that easy to spend time with Hiccup these days when he has a pushy girlfriend showing up out of nowhere."

"Seriously," Fredrick added. "I thought he was just coming out for some fresh air, but then he just took off with that Astrid."

"Screw it," Emma murmured. Then she yelled at the Road: "We can get this done by midnight if he stayed, and I can't do it on my own."

* * *

Hiccup had no idea how Astrid could live with two personalities. He knew that before she found him again, she was this cold-blooded agent who spent most of her time with her firearms and thinking about how to kill some bad guys. But, when she was back at Hiccup's house, she turned into this little girl that he remembered who would jump him without thinking about it.

She dropped her two MP7s on the couch the instant she stepped into the house and removed her black trench coach and hung it on a chair. Instead of wearing a white shirt beneath her trench coach, which she always wore, she only put on a very exposed black vest.

"Were you trying to lure me?" Hiccup asked as he placed his bag on the counter and took out some papers printed with photos taken by ultraviolet cameras about the BEC and scientific formulas about the right container to restrain the BEC. He planned to work on these at home when he had free time, but then he quickly realized that with Astrid being here, he might not have a lot of free time.

"So, any plans?" Astrid said as she closed the gap between her and Hiccup.

"Well, my original plan was to work on the project for a bit…" Hiccup answered, watching Astrid's fingers playing with the straps on his hoodie. "But it seems like it's not… gonna work."

"It will," Astrid whispered. "Take your stuff and work in your room. I need this place for now."

Hiccup cocked his head in puzzlement. He thought Astrid would just jump him right here. But he still gathered up the most important paper and headed toward his bedroom.

"Tell me if you need help with anything," Hiccup said as he placed the paper on his messy bed and sat on the edge of it.

Sometimes when he was tired or just not feeling like working behind a table, he would just move everything onto his bed and work under a blanket. His desk was just a few feet away from the bed, covered with scientific models of BEC and brainstorm sketches of different firearms that could be suitable to fire BEC. Hiccup's pupils moved slightly from left to right as he examined the papers and wrote down some notes on the side.

Half of his brain was concentrating on calculating the data, but the other half was calculating what Astrid was planning in the living room. He tried to force his entire brain to focus on the Project, which worked most of the time since Hiccup had this amazing skill of working under a lot of distractions.

Once some guards suddenly played heavy-metal music in Hiccup's lab at full volume when he was working on constructing a new flying suit, but he was unmoved.

But Astrid was not a distraction. She was already in his mind before all of this engineering stuff came in. Even though almost about a decade had passed, the memories about Astrid had never fainted or dimmed a bit. In some ways, the word "Astrid" was not just a memory, but an instinct that was planted in Hiccup's mind when he and she were just a few years old.

Hiccup shook his head and tried to pull his thoughts back to his work. He even needed to read the data out loud to make sure he didn't think of anything else.

"Fourteen carbon plus seven nitrogen plus two sulfur plus two... germanium?… titanium alloy as the muzzle… shit, I still need to deal with cleaning ups after firing... it's going to make a big mess… " Hiccup raised his head when he heard footsteps coming toward him. "Oh hey, Astrid… what the..."

Astrid was wearing… Hiccup had no idea what she was wearing, or at least what she was trying to express from her attire. She looked like she put on some t-shirt and shorts that were made of transparent plastic that allowed Hiccup to see every part of herself.

"You like this?" Astrid asked as she winked at Hiccup.

She loosened her blond hair and fanned them out behind her neck like a golden poncho. Her leather boots reached to her knee and the heels thudded as she walked.

"Well… I don't know… what to say," Hiccup couldn't remove his vision from Astrid. He placed his pen and paper on the bedsheet and watched Astrid moving toward him. Since he was sitting on the bed and Astrid was standing, he needed to look upward as she got closer.

She knelt between his legs, making her head the same height as his and her mouth just inches away from his. Hiccup's breath began to intense, and Astrid could feel the warm air brushing her face. Hiccup remained seated at the edge of his bed. He knew that according to Astrid's almost violent way of dealing with things, if he dared to escape, she would pick him up and throw him on the bed and jump on him, which was not-so-pleasant when Astrid was also an agent.

Her vision wandered from top to bottom of Hiccup's body, and her mouth curved up into a smile as she could see that his jeans were beginning to tent up.

"Just imagine that I'm not here," Astrid smirked as she began to unzip his jeans. "Carry on with what you were doing. I want to hear them as well."

"Ok then, if you insist," Hiccup said as he picked up his paper again while Astrid freed his swollen cock and her head started moving downward.

"I need to find a way to separate the BEC before firing it since firing the whole thing would cause too much damage, and…" Hiccup's eyes squinted as he felt Astrid's lips and teeth brushing against his cock. "Oh gods… Astrid can you not…"

"Keep going," Astrid's muffled voice came into his ears. "Otherwise…"

Hiccup's body trembled as he felt Astrid's teeth digging into his skin. He almost tried to pull away as Astrid increased the strength on her jaw, but her powerful arms held on to his thighs and pinned him down. She was a strong woman, and it was her job to capture those muscular criminals, so controlling a skinny engineer was easy-peasy for her.

"I need a… material that can cut through… ahhh… the BEC that will not destroy the property of it… I still need to… come up with a… sketch of the weaponry. I'm thinking of using… the design of a … laser gun … babe, go easier, please…" Hiccup tried his best to focus on the Project. It's not easy for him considering that Astrid was trying to eat him out.

"Normal steel won't work here… so I need to ask Gobber for his new materials…"

A loud moan from Astrid interrupted him. Hiccup removed the paper in front of his face and looked at the blonde between his legs. Her tongue coated Hiccup's cock with her saliva and she pushed him further down her mouth until he reached her throat. Astrid's head started rocking against Hiccup. First slow, but then she quickly picked up her pace.

Hiccup had no way of going back to the Project at this point. As she began to push him to his limit, Hiccup had to use both arms to keep himself up. He gasped each time when Astrid bit him.

He came inside her mouth, and Astrid swallowed the hot white cream without hesitation. His legs jerked and fell back to the bed. Hiccup could feel that this wasn't Astrid's first time doing this. She must've done the same experiment on someone else's cock.

"Do you want me to go back to science while you plan out your next move?" Hiccup asked while panting.

Astrid leaped onto the bed and landed on him and used her knees to keep him beneath her. When her tongue slipped into Hiccup's mouth, he could still taste the salty flavor of himself in Astrid's mouth.

"No, enough science. Let's get down to some real stuff," Astrid whispered as she yanked away Hiccup's hoodie.

* * *

They fell asleep naked in each other's arms a few hours later, when the sky had turned pitch black and the room was heated by the two. A tired and clothless Astrid curled up in Hiccup's embrace as she slept. Her forehead rested against Hiccup's chest and her messy hair tangled behind her neck.

Hiccup woke up just an hour after they went to sleep. His body was still aching after the three messy rounds. He confirmed his guess that Astrid was only good at fighting on a battlefield, but not on a bed. She was good at blowing him, but not at going all the way and playing dirty. He supported his head with one elbow, watched the girl in his arms. His other hand smoothed Astrid's hair until they were untangled and returned to the original state of a golden poncho behind her head. Her breath had calmed down to a normal rate and her sweat had evaporated.

After he was sure that Astrid was sound asleep, he put a pillow behind his head, turned on the small lamp beside the headboard, and started reviewing the photos and papers that they scattered across the bed sheet. He didn't forget to pull up the blanket a bit so that the dim light wouldn't wake the sleeping Astrid.

Even though he was just eighteen-years-old and had only worked in Muspelheim for three years, he had saved enough money to live a happy life until sixty. As one of the few best Lead Engineers in Muspelheim, his monthly salary was the same as a high school teacher's three months income, and his shared revenue was two percent of each deal that was led by him. The minimum price of each deal that Muspelheim made was about twenty thousand dollars, and DPA would give four million dollars to buy Project Bifrost. That means Hiccup would get eighty thousand dollars after Project Bifrost was completed.

He was still dreaming of finishing the project and moving to Charleston with Astrid. He had already told her about his plan, and she had agreed.

He smiled at his plan and laughed at himself about leaving Muspelheim at the age of eighteen. Most engineers would stay with Muspelheim until they were too old to work since the percentage of being accepted as an engineer by Muspelheim was even lower than the acceptance rate of Ivy League colleges. Then he turned his attention back to the data.

Just like Emma said, he always worked until 10 pm.

Astrid opened her eyes, and the first thing that came into her vision was Hiccup's chest that rose and fell while he breathed. She felt his arm around his waist and his jaw resting against her head. She liked it this way. After all those years of sleeping with her weapons and worrying about revenge from those criminals that she was hunting, she finally found a place where she could sleep safely. Astrid knew at least six DPA agents were killed when they were sleeping by their targets.

Last night was insane. She didn't know that Hiccup was a really good partner in bed. Even though she was way stronger than him, Hiccup still managed to control everything. Her entire body felt like they were about to come apart and her stiff muscles turned into jellies.

They didn't close the curtain, so she could still see the night sky with stars and the trees swaying in the wind outside. She pushed her body even closer to Hiccup's sleeping body, stealing his body heat and enjoying the sensation of his skin against hers.

A buzzing sound came into her ears. It was the sound of her phone. Not a lot of people had her phone number except for her teammates in DPA. Astrid reluctantly moved away from Hiccup's body and jumped down from the bed. When she was trying to tug him warm, she saw the research papers gathered together next to his head and some new words were written on them.

"Try hard…" Astrid murmured with a smile.

She walked across the darkened room, naked. Now she was familiar with the arrangement in Hiccup's bedroom so that she wouldn't bump into something when waking up at night to go to the bathroom. Her phone was vibrating on Hiccup's table with the screen lit on.

The word "Valka" appeared on the screen. Astrid checked the time on the top of the screen. It was 2 am.

"What is it?" Astrid answered the call lazily.

"What the hell were you doing last night?" Valka's voice was more like a bear roaring. Astrid had to turn down the volume to not wake Hiccup.

"I was…" Astrid stopped. How could she explain with the right words?

"Probably riding Hiccup," Astrid heard Ruffnut's faint voice in the background and other DPA agents laughing.

"I called you like twenty times!" Valka boomed.

"Uhhh…" Astrid scratched her head. "Yeah yeah I was doing what Ruffnut said."

"Ok, we don't care about your love life... come to Asheville airport right now. We are there waiting for you," Valka commanded.

"What's wrong?"

"Axl McDowell has been taken care of, and we have located the safehouse of Heimdall and the rest three are there. We are going to storm that place before the sun comes out."

The message swept away Astrid's sleepiness. Her eyes turned from the loving girl back to the agent that lived with death and weapons.

"Where is it?"

"It's in this god damned city all the time!"

"Meet me in front of Hiccup's house. Right now I don't have a car to go to the airport," Astrid said as she walked into the living room where she put her trench coat and MP7s and put the extra megs into the sleeves on the Kevlar vest.

She put on the battle suit that DPA gave to its agents: a black long-sleeved suit, cut resistant gloves, Kevlar vests, black pants with holsters for handguns, and black boots that were suitable for all sorts of surfaces. She put on her trench coat at last. With a fluent motion, she checked the two MP7s and hid them into the customized holsters inside her trench coat.

A few minutes later, the sharp sound of car brakes came from outside the door. Astrid opened the door and saw three black SUVs stopped on the road. The windows on the cars reflected the yellow street lights and.

"C'mon!" Valka rolled down the driver's side window of the first SUV.

"Hang on," Astrid replied.

She ran back to the bedroom and placed a gentle kiss on the sleeping Hiccup's right cheek, "I'll be back in the morning… probably."

When she jumped onto the seat behind Valka, the convoy headed down the street at full speed. Astrid put on the earphone that Ruffnut handed to her. She could hear Tuffnut and Snotlout arguing in the channel about who was the dom in Hiccup and Astrid's relationship. Other agents made different comments during their argument.

Ruffnut shrugged at Astrid and whispered "sorry" to her. Astrid rolled her eyes. She knew her teammates way too well.

"Two SWAT teams will be assisting our mission, and right now that place has been secretly surrounded by thirty local cops. I warned them to do everything under the radar, but I'm pretty sure those three already know that they are been targeted," Valka turned around and said to Astrid. "So we might not have the element of surprise. Prepare for some intense gunfights. Local police and SWAT can't face them, so Team Echo is coming from North Carolina to aid us. A platoon of South Carolina national guards is on their way as well. We don't know if they hired more gunmen. What happened at Muspelheim might happen here again."

"Seems like a lot of people are invited to the party," Astrid commented as she peeked at the trunk. 'You even brought a Javelin?"

"Yes ma'am," Ruffnut said as she loaded a steel arrow into her military tactical crossbow.

"Who uses a crossbow right now?" Astrid snorted. "I can empty a whole clip while you shoot only one arrow."

"Quiet down everyone," Valka's voice came into the channel. All the other voices suddenly disappeared. "We all know the drill..."

"Yes, ma'am," Tuffnut interrupted. "Blow open the door, get in, and start bashing everyone."

Other agents laughed at the joke.

"Shut up Tuff," Valka ordered. Then she returned to her normal tone: "Right now their leader is gone, but the other three are still desperadoes. I want no mistakes whatsoever. Today, we end these bastards once and for all."

* * *

**To be continued**

* * *

**Thank you for all of your support toward this story, and please feel free to leave a question or comment below. **

**Right now since it's almost to the end of this story and I'm not planning to stretch this story too long, I'm thinking of writing a sequel. I already have the idea for it. Hopefully it'll be better than this one *fake smile*. **


	15. Chapter 15

**Hi guys, sorry for the late update. I wrote this one a long time ago. (It's almost to the end of the story)**

Chapter 15:

Valka stared at her stomach, the sharp tip of an ancient, dark brown, World War Two time period bayonet stuck out from her body. It was her bayonet that she carried on her belt the whole time. Her fresh blood quickly dyed her uniform. She looked down from the HK 416 that she was holding with surprise. Valka was paired up with Astrid and two other SWAT officers, and after the team breached the door their job was to take control of the guest bedroom and bathroom of the first floor. The rest of Team Foxtrot and SWAT would take care of the rest. A platoon of North Carolina National Guard surrounded the house from outside and brought in armored vehicles.

Astrid would never betray her, Valka thought, and she trusted the SWAT. Their commanding officer was her classmate in the police academy.

Then the pain rushed into her brain, almost tearing apart every single nerve along the way. Even though she was always a field officer, she had never been severely wounded, at least not being stabbed by a bayonet.

"Really surprised, aren't you? I like the way you look when you are surprised and in pain," a familiar voice came into her ears as if the speaker was whispering to her.

Valka couldn't turn back yet since whoever stabbed her was still holding the bayonet and was trying to push it more into her body. She squinted her eyes.

Valka wanted to know why Astrid and the two SWAT weren't doing anything. They were standing only a few feet behind her. But two gunshots of an MP7 answered her question. The two officers laid down on the ground, each with a hole in the middle of their forehead.

She recognized the sound of that gun. Even though they were gunfighting on the second floor Valka could still recognize them. Only Astrid's MP7 made that sound. The clear chopping sound. Valka redesigned the barrels of that two MP7s, made them quieter while added more spin to the bullets.

"Yes, it's me the whole time," Astrid said in a tone that Valka had never heard before, like the forked tongue of a dangerous serpent.

Valka tried to say something to her earphone, but Astrid grabbed her headset and threw them into the corner.

"You are… Albert Manstein," Valka spat out the words in pain, but with a faint smile on her face. "Why did I only run face-id on men?"

"Because you are stupid?" Astrid chuckled as she pulled out the bayonet from Valka's body and threw it on the ground, the metal clanged as it hit the ground and drops of blood fanned out onto the carpet.

The sun was right above the house by now. Even though they had already surrounded the house at 3 am, they waited until noon to breach.

* * *

Meanwhile, when Team Foxtrot and SWAT were battling David, Nina, and Evan in that house, Hiccup and Emma were presenting their finished product to three DPA agents who came to pay the second half of the payment, two million dollars. Sam game Hiccup a small empty field along the trees behind Asgard to present the weapon to the representatives of DPA. Three armed guards were with them.

Astrid sent Hiccup a message before they breached that house and told him everything was fine and he shouldn't worry about her, so Hiccup woke up the next morning and went to Asgard and dived back into Project Bifrost right away.

"Congratulations!" the leading agent clapped his hand as he watched an apple turning into an ice cube in the shape of an apple as a visible laser-like beam struck it.

The molecules inside the apple had a speed 300 miles per hour faster than an airplane slowed to the speed of a bicycle when Hiccup fired the weapon armed with Bose-Einstein Condensate.

The so-called "weapon" didn't look like a conventional weapon at all. It looked more like an oversized flamethrower with the thrower part shaped like a trident.

"The three heads on the top can concentrate the condensation and charge them so that the touch of room temperature wouldn't affect them," Hiccup explained as one agent walked over and asked him about it. Gobber and Sam were standing beside them. Hiccup had run tests under their direct supervision for millions of times and they weren't new to everything Hiccup was doing here.

The only reason he tried to act all friendly was they didn't want the clients to think they had bad manners. The military could be a very good client.

A few engineers who were on their break time gathered around to watch, and some of them got into an intense conversation of which exact technique did Hiccup use to prevent the BEC to leave the barrel and not be broken down by the atmosphere.

The agent walked over to the frozen apple. He reached out his hand and tried to touch it after a few seconds of hesitation.

"Uh… you don't want to do that," Hiccup reminded him.

"Why is that?" the agent asked, but he didn't draw back his hand.

"It's like an ice cube, but a normal ice cube that you throw into your soda is about negative 10 Celsius, but that thing is about negative 200 Celsius. You need to wait until the air around us to warm it up. If you touch it, the apple will turn into pieces because they are too fragile, but you might lose your hand or your life as well."

The agent drew back his hand as fast as lightning.

"So you invented a freezer?" the third agent asked.

"If you mean those freezer guns in the video games then yes," Emma replied. She had been standing by the tank for the whole time.

"Have you tried them on humans before?" the agent continued.

"No, but any volunteers?" Emma asked with a smile.

The agent laughed and nodded at his companions.

"Our tech guys will take it from here," the agent said. "They'll take over Project Bifrost. The second half of the payment, two million dollars, have been transferred to Muspelhiem's bank account that Mr. Samuel Timothy gave us."

"Where are Steven and his buddy?" one agent asked his companions.

"They are on Team Bravo, which…" another one replied. "They are in the Amazon."

"Amazon as the forest? What are they doing over there?"

"You think they need Team Bravo for the Amazon company?"

"So are you three going to take this back?" Emma asked.

The three agents looked at the big machine, and then they looked at each other.

"Do you have delivery service?" one asked.

* * *

The SWAT team wasn't Astrid's opponent. After stabbing her team leader Astrid took out both of her MP7s and slaughtered almost all the SWAT officers on the first floor in half a minute. Astrid was lucky that the rest of Team Foxtrot was on the second floor, and considering the wild gunshots, David, Nina, and Evan were still resisting.

When Astrid ran up the stairs, she was greeted by Snotlout, who was holding an M249 and hiding behind a SWAT holding a riot shield. A riot shield wouldn't be bulletproof for a long time in short-range gunfights like this, but the officer was trying to take some chances.

"Snotlout why are you hiding the whole time?" Astrid shouted as she raised her MP7 and pulled the trigger.

"Astr…" Snotlout tried to say something, but it was too late. MP7's rounds were designed to pierce through the bullet-prove vests Snotlout and SWAT were wearing.

"What the fuck is this?" Tuffnut yelled at her. He still didn't question Astrid's loyalty. He thought Astrid had gone crazy.

"I'm sorry Tuff," Astrid fired three rounds at Tuffnut's chest. The bullets punched through his rib cage and tore apart his lungs.

"Oh no, you don't!" Ruffnut cried as she took out a small dagger from the sheath between her thigh and handgun holster and threw it at Astrid. "I have been watching you for a long time, bitch!"

The dagger missed Astrid's throat, which was where Ruffnut was aiming for, but it still made a scratch on Astrid's shoulder.

Before she could point her MP7 at Ruffnut, Ruffnut swung her AKM at Astrid's face. Astrid blocked the attack with her arms and seized the weapon. Before Ruffnut could pull out her handgun, Astrid threw a punch at her chest and another of her powerful sidekick landed on Ruff's head. Before Ruff could find his balance and strike back, Astrid picked up a fallen M416 from the ground and struck Ruff's head with the stock, that piece of metal finally knocked her out.

Clement, the field engineer of Team Foxtrot, turned into a corpse with two holes on his back head before he could realize who killed him.

Two more SWAT officers did try to kill Astrid since they sort of figured out what was going on with that weird woman, but their dual skills didn't let them live to tell the tale.

Astrid swept the second floor. She found Evan's body lying against the wall of the storage room, whoever killed him shot enough rounds at Evan that his guts spilled out.

He must've created a lot of trouble, Astrid thought.

She continued sweeping. She had never come to this safehouse before. She heard about it from Erik, but Erik had never given her the address. It was a gigantic house. It didn't look so big from the outside, but the second floor had at least four bedrooms and three bathrooms and a common room the size of half of the tremendous living room downstairs. The walls were stuffed with thick steel plates and doors were bullet-proof as well. Bed mattresses seemed to have Kevlar in them, maybe the designer thought whoever lives here could jump off the bed and flip over their mattress and get straight into gunfights.

Team Foxtrot seemed to have some trouble with the third bedroom. The person resisting seemed to armed herself with at least ten guns and enough mags to arm a platoon. She was shooting wildly at the door while shouting the dirtiest words on the top of her voice.

A SWAT officer tried to get in from the window, but Nina was already waiting for him when he repelled down from the roof. An MP5 blew up his head.

Astrid fired at the agents that she had fought alongside for years. She didn't have any hesitation. Why would she? Her goal was to get their trust and kill them at the right moment. She hated them. After being captured by them years ago at the coast of the Persian Gulf and endured weeks of being locked in a small cell and being tortured, her heart had become as cold and hard as a rock.

Hiccup was the only soft spot of that rock. She couldn't wipe out her past with him. The careless hours running on the beach of Charleston were carved in her brain.

Astrid froze when the thought of "what to do with Hiccup" crossed her mind, and with that time, the agents threw three hand-size granite tubes into the room. Nina was killed in the explosion, and when the agents went into the room, they fired rounds and rounds at her torn body, as revenge, since two agents and four SWAT officers died in her hand.

Ruffnut woke up. Her vision was still spinning, but her consciousness was enough for her to switch the channel of her earphone to DPA's public channel. It was designed for agents to reach for support when their team was down. DPA spent a lot of money to ensure the stability and range of that channel and agents could call from every corner of the Earth.

Ruffnut told whoever was listening about what happened in her Team.

Astrid recognized the chit chat behind her back, so her MP7 turned and pointed at Ruff. Astrid hesitated when she was pulling the trigger.

"Do it, you motherfucker!" Ruffnut roared at her while reaching her hand for the handgun resting in the holster on her thigh.

Astrid ran over to Ruffnut, knocking her out again, and threw her out of the window. Ruff would survive being dropped from the second floor. Astrid didn't want to kill her, even though she just killed Tuff a few seconds ago.

Even though Ruff had sent the message, it would take a while for DPA to notice the National Guards outside, who were the only armed force except for Team Foxtrot and the SWAT team who had the ability to start a good gunfight against Astrid, and the nearest Team was at least a few hundred miles away. Local police couldn't do anything to someone like Astrid with their Glock 19.

* * *

On the field behind Asgard, the three agents who came to pick up the weapon were who received Ruff's message first. They looked at each other.

If Astrid turned against them, it wouldn't be easy to take her down. DPA poured millions of dollars into training her. At that time the high command didn't expect Astrid to use the skills she learned against them.

"Where is our closest team?" one agent asked.

"Uh… Team Golf, in New York," an agent replied after looking at his phone. "It's actually half of Team Golf, the rest is in Paris."

"How many SWAT teams can we control in this area?"

"The one with Team Foxtrot right now, and another one in Asheville."

"Tell that team to go to that house right now and tell the National Guards there to put Astrid as a priority target," that agent, who was clearly the one in command, announced. "Call for as many back-ups as possible. We'll go there now as well, prepare the car."

"Astrid might be long gone by the time we get there," one reminded.

"Astrid?" Hiccup asked after watching his clients chatting mysteriously and not focusing on the presentation.

"It's our private things," one agent said.

"No, I know her. Astrid Hofferson, right?" Hiccup insisted.

The agent looked at his leader, and the leader nodded gently. He remembered that the engineer standing before them was the so-called "secret lover" of one of their finest agents.

"Yes, it's about Astrid."

"What happened to her?"

"She… one of her team members reported her betrayal actions and was in support of a terrorist group," the agent said after getting the consent from his leader. "These are not confirmed information, though."

"So what are you going to do?" Hiccup asked urgently.

"Check it out," the leader said. Then he turned to the weapon. "Do you mind if one of your engineers would accompany us with the weapon? This is a chance for us to test it in action."

"Wait wait, you are going to use it on Astrid?" Hiccup almost shrieked.

"No no! There are still terrorists remaining out there," the agent replied. "We are going to use it on the terrorists."

Hiccup didn't reply.

"So is that ok?" the agent asked Sam, who had already walked over to them to see what was going on.

"Only Hiccup and Emma know about that weapon well enough," Sam shrugged.

"No, I'm not going!" Emma cried as she stepped back. "I don't want to get caught in the middle of a gunfight."

The three agents looked at Hiccup.

"Fine, I'll come with you," Hiccup finally agreed. There was a chance for him to meet Astrid, no matter what side she was on right now. Hiccup knew that he would love her even when she was the most wanted terrorist.

* * *

David fought to the end as well. Even though SWAT and DPA did take them by surprise and Evan didn't have the time to detonate the bombs in the stairways, their gunfighting skills still kept them alive for a few more minutes.

At least five bodies of SWAT officers and three Team Foxtrot agents piled up before the door of the room David was hiding in. The order didn't say whether to kill the targets on the spot or capture them, but in the end, the SWAT definitely wanted to capture one, so that they could hit the hell out of him as revenge for their fallen friends.

David didn't let that happen.

Before the SWAT could smoke him out, David darted out of the room, both hands holding an Uzi and holding a hand grenade in his mouth.

The SWAT shot him down before he could do any further damage with the two Uzies, but the grenade rolled out from his mouth and exploded, dismembering David and the officer nearest to him.

The National Guards outside looked out from behind their armored cars as the gunshots in the house quieted down.

Astrid walked out of the house with the remaining SWAT. She didn't want to fight her way out of here, and the remaining SWAT was so focused on fighting their designated targets they missed what Astrid was doing, so they thought Astrid was still with them, just as the last person on her team.

She exchanged a few words with the officers after exiting the house, and then she walked to the SUVs parked on the road and sat into the one she rode on.

Astrid imagined this day would come, but she didn't know what she would feel toward all this. Yes, Astrid was a member of Heimdall, and she created another completely fake identity for her, Albert Manstein, in case "Astrid Hofferson" was in danger. But she couldn't forget the time she spent with Valka, Snotlout, the twin, and Team Foxtrot. She formed another connection with her enemy when she didn't know. When she stabbed the bayonet into Valka's torso, Astrid suddenly felt as if she was stabbing Hiccup or herself. Her mind was blank at that moment. If Astrid remained at that weak mental stage a few seconds longer, Valka had a good chance of killing Astrid.

But in the end, Astrid's real self broke the chains and went free, like Pandora's box.

At that moment, when Astrid was having a flashback of her time with her teammates, a black SUV with tinted windows stopped slowly beside hers. Astrid looked at it. It was the SUV that all DPA agents used. That means one agent received Ruff's message. Astrid's window wasn't tinted, and the person in the other SUV must've recognized her by now. Her only chance was to press down the gas pedal and runoff or pull out her MP7 and shoot.

She did none of them. Astrid just looked at the SUV like a little girl looking for her mom.

"What the hell is she looking at?" the agent driving said, one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding a loaded Scorpion Evo 3 pistol.

"Is she daydreaming?" the other one sitting with Hiccup replied.

Their plan was to use the Scorpion to provide covering fire and the other two agents tranq her with darts. But when they rolled up and saw her watching them with weird eyes, they all froze.

Astrid shook her head gently, bringing herself back. When she recognized that SUV, she pulled out one of her MP7s and shot at least twenty rounds at the driver's side window.

That wasn't the best choice since the gunshots would draw the National Guards and the remaining SWAT toward them, and the National Guards had armored cars with machine guns. Astrid didn't know why she made that choice. If she drove off as nothing had happened, the agents would just follow her, and the National Guards would think they were leaving.

The window was bulletproof, triple-layered, and reinforced, and Astrids' first twenty rounds didn't break the glass.

"Don't shoot at me, Astrid!" Hiccup yelled as he tried to hide behind an agent.

"Go go go!" the leader cried.

The driver pushed the door open and poured bullets at Astrid. Scorpion could fire up to 1150 rounds per minute, so it emptied the mag in about two seconds. But Scorpion wasn't known for its power. Most rounds were stopped by the windows and the steel frame. Only one punched through and made a small scratch on Astrid's arm.

At the same time, the leader fired the dart in his tranquilizer gun.

But the dart missed. It missed Astrid's neck by a centimeter and buried itself in the seat.

"Fuck!" he yelled.

Astrid fired again. She pulled out her other MP7 and squeezed the trigger as if she wanted to break it.

All forty rounds inside her customized mag were fired, and at least thirty landed on the leader. In this short range, his Kevlar only stopped another five or six rounds. Most bullets didn't pierce through his body, only scrambled his organs into pieces and wouldn't harm Hiccup, who was hiding behind him. But one bullet, which hit the agent's arm, wasn't stopped by his bones. It flew out from behind and buried itself into Hiccup's abdomen.

Hiccup was an engineer, not a fighter. He felt as if someone had opened up a hole on his belly and stuffed an entire hammer in it.

The third agent, who was sitting at the third row holding the finished weapon of Project Bifrost, raised up the trident-like barrel and pointed it at Astrid. Hiccup taught him how to turn a small knob to control the condensate flow, and in the end, controlling the freezing effect when he was doing the final presentation.

This time, after watching his companion being so brutally killed and body stuffed with thirty rounds, he turned the knob all the way and pointed the barrel at Astrid.

The instinct condensate current was so huge that the agent felt as if he was putting his hands into ice. When he fired, the flow was as wide as a human torso and it froze Astrid's body right at contact.

Astrid wasn't the only thing that was frozen. The entire SUV was covered by a thick layer of frost, created by the water molecules floating around in the atmosphere. One second everything was normal, and the next second the SUV looked as if someone had left it at the South Pole for a hundred years at extremely low temperature.

"Don't… don't touch… it…" Hiccup said weakly, covering his wound with one hand, but blood still dripped out from his fingertips.

Hiccup knew that the SUV, and Astrid, were at a temperature so low that the molecules in them were hardly moving at all, and the slightest touch would turn them into splinters. The only thing that was still holding Astrid and the SUV together was the overly charged electricity roaming around through the molecules, increasing the power they release from the slow movement.

"We need a team of scientists and doctors and engineers and everybody!" the SWAT, who was running toward them when they heard the gunshots, said to his radio when he saw the terrifying scene. He thought the man in the SUV must've fired some sort of freeze gun, like something from a video game or sci-fi movies.

Hiccup tried to climb closer to Astrid's body, but he was only moving a few centimeters on the back seat. He knew Astrid was dead, no human could endure that low temperature.

* * *

**To be continued. **

**Ok I guess I'll just tell you guys, this is the second to the last chapter. Surprising, right? You might be thinking the ending might be too rushed. **

**But don't worry, there will be a sequel, which is going to be a ****separate story. **


	16. Chapter 16

**Well guys, this is the end of "Project Bifrost". It has been my pleasure to read and write with all of you. **

**There will be a sequel, so watch out! The name of the sequel will be "Project Bifrost: the Dark War". **

Chapter 16:

When Hiccup entered a heavily guarded room of Charleston Air Force Base, accompanied by Gobber, a lieutenant, and two armed soldiers, he could still feel the faint pain coming up from his stomach.

It has been three months since that day. Hiccup healed his wound in two weeks and he returned to work in Muspelheim after three weeks. DPA gave them a very positive review on Project Bifrost, but Hiccup let Emma take care of the aftermath. He didn't want to deal with it anymore.

The police found Fishlegs in the basement of that house. He was beaten and endured days of torture. Another woman was there as well, but she was dead, with a hole on her forehead.

Sam decided to bring Fishlegs back to Asgard and leave the English division to someone else. Sam thought Fishlegs's return might cheer Hiccup up a bit, but that didn't work. Everyday Hiccup wondered in his lab, like a lost ghost in the human world. Gobber assigned him some light work. He would do it, but just with much less passion than before. Most of the time he would lock himself in his lab, doing something.

He didn't talk to anyone, except for some slight conversation with Fishlegs. Some of the older engineers had family members in the military, and also faced the loss of family members. They tried to help Hiccup out of his mental turmoil but Hiccup didn't listen to them. Each time when they wanted to start a conversation Hiccup would just murmur "my invention killed her".

"Just let us know what you need," the lieutenant said to Gobber before he went back to his work.

This visit wasn't for Hiccup. It was for Gobber. Muspelheim was Charleston Air Force Base's contracted technical support company, and Gobber was here today to renew some systems.

They stopped before a large, transparent cylinder. It was at least twice of Hiccup's height, like an enlarged energy can in those video games. At least a dozen wires and pipes were connected to the top of the cylinder.

A person was inside the cylinder. Her body was surrounded by another capsule-like plastic cover. Her skin was covered with a thin layer of frost and different wires were connected to her back. Her eyes were open, but they were soulless, staring blankly at the front.

The person was, of course, Astrid.

"Our technicians arrived just five minutes after she was frozen. We used liquid nitrogen and that capsule to protect her body from outer air," a sergeant walked out from the corner.

"That's the base's chief engineer," Gobber said as he opened his bag and took out a computer and some cables and connected the computer to the cylinder's controlling CPU.

"You are here to fix this?" Hiccup asked Gobber.

"Yeah, the system needs constant renewal due to how her body reacts," Gobber answered as he typed some codes into the computer.

"I… I'm not an expert in human freezing," Hiccup confessed.

"That capsule," the sergeant pointed at the second protection layer around Astrid's body. "Creates an atmosphere very close to a vacuum, and it'll adjust the air pressure accordingly. We use liquid nitrogen to keep her cold. In there, no matter how fragile her body is, she won't be affected by…"

"Is she dead or not?" Hiccup interrupted him, still staring at the lifeless Astrid.

"That's a tricky question," the sergeant scratched his head. "Biologically she is dead. No heartbeat, no pulse. Her body temperature is now negative 150 degrees Celsius, so that means her blood is frozen as well as the brain. But the reason we kept her in this capsule is that there is a chance of unfreezing her."

"Like those in movies? Put someone in a freezer and wake them up thousands of years later?" Hiccup asked.

"That technically could work," Gobber added. "Technically."

"So don't expect too much. She is also here for research purposes." the sergeant continued. "She could be woken up, but the chance is really low. The slightest touch on her body will instantly disrupt her molecular state."

"What research purposes?" Hiccup asked.

"You know, human body reaction toward extreme temperature and all those. The data we collect from her might help us deal with cold temperatures in the future."

"This is Charleston, you don't get cold temperatures," Hiccup said.

"Well… it's under the order of DARPA."

"Fuck ARPA. What actual power do they have anyway," Gobber blurted out. He still referred to them as ARPA since when he started working for Muspelheim DARPA was still called ARPA. "ARPA should mean A Really Pathetic Area."

"Uhh…" the sergeant scratched his head again. "I'm from DARPA."

"Now that makes sense," Gobber chuckled.

Hiccup walked toward the cylinder. He gently laid his palm on the glass, staring at the girl inside. Her hair used to be smooth and soft, but now they turned into fragile frozen strings.

If he didn't pick the path of becoming an engineer, Astrid wouldn't be laying in this can today. He still remembered that when they were ten, Astrid suggested they should become athletes. Astrid was an excellent runner and Hiccup had talents in modern archery. If he took her advice, now they might be traveling from tournaments to tournaments. Tired, but they would be together and alive.

A single drop of tear rolled down his cheek. When it landed on the ground, it shattered like a crystal, reflecting the cold white lights. Hiccup rarely cried after he lost his father. He knew crying didn't help at all. The only way to solve problems was to get stronger.

Hiccup wasn't rich, but he was wealthy. As the top engineer in Muspelheim, he had a six-digit annual salary, not including the 10% he got from each deal. He didn't need a lot of money to live, but now he would use all of his money to exchange for Astrid's life.

"Don't leave me," he murmured under his breath. "I can't imagine a world without you."

The sergeant waited quietly. He already knew the story of this young engineer and that girl.

Losing someone you love is hard, but when your loved one is before your eyes but you can't talk or touch her is harder.

After typing in the last line of code, Gobber closed his computer, unplugged the cables, and put his equipment back into his bag.

"Let's go. We still have things to do in Asgard." Gobber patted Hiccup's shoulder.

Hiccup nodded. But before he turned back and walked away with Gobber, he thought he saw something coming out from those two lifeless eyes.

"Wait," he said. Then turning toward the sergeant. "Do you have an infrared camera?"

"Yeah, why?" the sergeant replied, puzzled.

"I need to use it, now!"

The sergeant thought about it, and then he turned to the shelf behind him and took down the camera.

Hiccup grabbed the infrared camera from his hand and pointed it at Astrid's head. The image was dark blue as if it was a picture of the deep ocean. But in the middle of the image, Hiccup saw an area color-coded as light blue.

A temperature difference.

A person submerged in liquid nitrogen couldn't heat up himself using only his body heat. But the infrared camera captured the faint image of a heat source.

"There is heat in her brain!" Hiccup shouted as if he had discovered a new continent.

"But that's impossible! She is covered with liquid nitrogen!" the sergeant said.

"That means she could be woken up, and the chance is huge!" Hiccup cried, throwing the camera back to the sergeant and ran toward Gobber, who was already waiting for him outside. "I can find a way to wake her up!"

"No kid," Gobber shook his head. "Even though there is heat coming from her body, it doesn't mean her organ would survive the defrost. The technology today can not preserve the organs under such a drastic temperature change. And if you, for some miracle, heat up her body to normal temperature without disrupting her molecular state, her blood vessels and brain won't survive the process."

Hiccup stared at Gobber, like a kid whose parents told him Santa Claus doesn't exist.

"It's over, Hiccup," Gobber sighed. "You have to look into the future. I bet if Astrid could think right now, she wants you to move on in life and not be stuck on this small incident."

"I can find a way, Gobber," Hiccup said softly but with great strength.

* * *

When Gobber and Hiccup left, the lieutenant walked into the room again. The sergeant was still there. Two more people showed up, and they were wearing uniforms with the letters "DARPA" on the front.

"The boy still has hope in him," the lieutenant said.

"I guess they were really close," the sergeant shrugged.

"You know the chance of waking her up is high. You are an engineer and a biologist," the lieutenant's tone was harsh this time. "Orders from the top, we need to keep her frozen no matter what. Her scientific research value is higher than our prediction."

The sergeant nodded, looking at the cylinder.

"So we are turning into underground research facilities, huh? I'm a scientist, and I'm not people like you."

"But you are a soldier as well."

"What's the plan?" the sergeant replied after a few seconds.

"DARPA will take over from here. You are going to assist their work and I'll take care of the security. Our contract with Muspelheim is over. They are our enemy now."

"Just because a boy wants to wake up his girlfriend?"

"No, we overlooked Samuel Timothy. Muspelheim is planning something bigger. Project Bifrost is just a diversion."

* * *

**The end. **

***ta da!* **

**Watch out for "Project Bifrost: the Dark War", coming soon! **


End file.
